A year ago, I stumbled upon a thought provoking question that has had quite an impact on how I think:

What are your 10 year goals? How can you achieve them in 6 months?

The point here is not necessarily to end up achieving your 10 year goals in 6 months, but the exercise of thinking of an answer itself will be eye-opening.

Some of your long term goals can actually be achieved in a much shorter period of time. And if you realize you can do that, then why the hell not? Living one’s life with a sense of urgency to achieve will require more effort, but it certainly is more rewarding.

Granted, some things come with time (coupled with work), but perhaps the majority of our goals are just pending our disciplined action.

[this is work in progress]

I stumble upon numerous pieces of wisdom or philosophy every now and then that I end up applying on my everyday life. With time, however, I tend to forget some of them and feel like I’m re-learning some lessons when I find them again. Hence, inspired by my friend Fahad, I decided to jot down all the rules, principals, and pieces of wisdom that I wish to follow here so I can revisit them every few weeks. I’ll jot them down scattered down here, and perhaps organize them with time. This is mainly for my own reference, but I figured it might be helpful for others as well.

On Knowledge

• No matter how much you know, you know little.
• Knowledge is a great thing, only if put in a phenomenal application. You’ll need to learn a lot however before you’re able to apply some of that knowledge.
• You are incredibly lucky to be alive in this day & age. Access to information has NEVER been easier. Utilize it. Learn in every means you can and from every channel possible. Learn about what you’re interested in and what matters to you. Learn about what we learned from the past and what’s important for the future.
• We tend to place things into boxes, and that’s not entirely a bad thing. We’re animals of pattern. Patterns and boxes help us understand things better by making them more predictable, and that’s how we can build on them. Every while though, these boxes become outdated, and you must be open enough to take things out of that box, figure them out, and put them in a new updated one.
• Documentation of knowledge and wisdom has been extremely beneficial for the human race.

On Wisdom

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I’ve visited some of the most expensive cities in the world recently, and the food was almost as expensive, if not cheaper than the GCC (proper meals, not cafeteria food). In this post, I try to breakdown the reason(s):

To start with, restaurants have 3 main cost elements:

1. food ingredients
2. real estate and
3. labor.

Gulf countries have SIGNIFICANTLY lower costs on all 3 elements!

1. Crops, meats, and dairy are cheaper (whether local or imported).*
2. Real estate is 2-3 times cheaper.*
3. Labor is 3-4 times cheaper.**

So why the heck is food in restaurants so expensive here? It makes no sense. Some might think that it’s greed, which may be a factor, but certainly not the prevalent one.
After a lot of thinking & analysis, I reached to the conclusion that high food prices track back mainly to poor demand generation, which results in poor unit economics management.

There’s very little traffic to restaurants here compared to international urban cities. But why??

Well, multiple reasons. Here are some:

• For one, urban planning is poor in most GCC cities, or  at least not designed for transportation efficiency
  • meaning there are no areas of condensed traffic
  • low foot traffic due to the weather
  • less orders for restaurants per neighborhood
• Most people live & work in different places, resulting in areas full of offices, and others full of homes. This means that:
  • Restaurants in homey areas have orders only during evenings in weekdays, & sometimes on weekends. Otherwise, they’re dead.
  • Restaurants in office areas have orders only during weekdays day-time. Otherwise, they’re dead.
• There’s too many restaurants for the consumers with purchasing power (there’s 1 restaurant for every 300 people in New York. But there’s 1 restaurant for every 150 in Bahrain for example, meaning more restaurants are making less money).

That means in order for a restaurant to survive (break-even on recurring operational costs) they have to charge higher margins to make up for the low traffic!

Food delivery startups have helped solve that problem slightly, but added another massacre of 20-30% cuts, not really benefiting the users or restaurants by much in the long run.

Cloud kitchens promise to resolve this, but on-demand food production is still time consuming, delivery times are still high, and cost is on the rise regardless of current cheap labor availability.

Wonder what the solution may be.

* New York vs. Riyadh in terms of cost of living (produce + real estate)
** minimum wage in  NYC, SF, AMS, etc… ranges between $12-15 compared to $2-4 in the GCC.

Maybe the secret to living a happy life is in not taking things too seriously. Maybe it’s also the secret to succeeding at whatever goal you desire, as it makes you less uptight and more likable. Maybe it’s ok to accept mediocrity every now and then, because life is like that. Sometimes good, sometimes bad, and has mediocrity all over it. Maybe it’s ok to admit that life is shit sometimes and not live with so many made up rules that make you uptight and pretentious. Maybe start truly accepting that shit happens and that people’s well-being is more important than any other arguably meaningless goal. Technically, all human goals should contribute to elevating the state of humans, and if whatever goal you pursue is built on the acceptance of hurting someone’s well-being then that defies the whole purpose. Maybe being “type A” gets you somewhere fast, but also kills you -and your relationships with people- fast. Maybe.. Just maybe.

Funny enough I think this was triggered by this Cafe I’m sitting at in Amsterdam that had so many imperfections which somehow made it so fucking beautiful.

Old man on a ladder fixing a light in the middle of the Cafe at noon because it needed to be fixed for him to go home and see his family later. Waitress takes a long time to respond to you because she’s busy serving others. Chef leaves the kitchen every now and then to take a walk because he’s bored. Waiter grabs a fry and munches on it as he delivers the tray to the right table because he’s hungry. Why the fuck not.

Maybe.. Just maybe.

Over the past few years, I’ve developed a decision making process that helped me navigate through the toughest and biggest decisions of my life so far, and it has never failed me as it runs on objectivity. Give it a try if you’re stuck with a decision. Here it goes:

If you’re unsure of a decision, don’t ask people for advice right away. Grab a piece of paper, write down the problem, mention the options, and run a quick SWOT analysis on each (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) be very objective. Make it into a table like this one:Read More

Over the past few years, I have tested many task management tools, read about plenty of methodologies, and experimented with different approaches and routines in the pursuit of productivity. Let’s just say that I didn’t stick to any one of them for a good reason: they didn’t work well. The main reasons for their failure, I believe, are the following:

• Triggers: I tend to forget about my task management tool (where I wrote down what I need to do basically). My tasks need to be top of mind so I would actually do them.
• Distractions: We get interrupted a dozen times a minute in this day and age, especially in a fast paced work environment. That does you no favor to focus on the task at hand to finish it with quality in a timely manner.
• Prioritization: Which tasks are more important?
• Rewards: There’s usually little motivation/incentive for me to get all the things on my list done

The reason why I’m calling this the Rawi model is because, well, it’s my last name. Deal with it.

So, here’s how it goes in a nutshell. I’ll explain the steps in the process, then I’ll dive deeper into each step.

1. Write down the tasks
2. Estimate the time that each task will take
3. Assign the priority for each task
4. Record the time you actually spend on each
5. Update your list

Sounds simple enough, huh? Here’s what makes this different than everything you’ve been doing.

Step 1: Write

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The beauty in any piano piece mainly lies in 3 variables. It lies in having each note that plays to be slightly different from the one before it; not too similar, not too different (variance). It lies in having the piece shift between the fast and the slow pace to form the perceived harmony right in the middle (speed). It lies in having the pitch of these notes interchange between the happy and the sad (balance).

Without variance between people, life would be dull. We need people who are different from us just as much as we need people who are similar to us, and the best people for us are those in the middle; not too similar, not too different.

Without speed changes in life pace, life would be boring. We will have fast-paced days where we can barely catch up, and we will have days where we’re taking a step back, slowing down, reflecting and relaxing; both are necessary for each other.

Without balance between good and bad, life would be meaningless. We must have bad days to have good ones. If there was nothing wrong, then there’d be nothing right; both have to coexist.

I got into a conversation with an intellectual person from my circle recently, and after discussing my answer to “What Inspires You?” she asked me the following question.

One more question if I may

How do you inspire yourself? It’s like we wait for inspiration to come through books or people or something like a muse but how do you find it now? How do you know what book to read or who to talk to? Knowing that you are stuck and you need to be inspired like you’ve been before that will lead the way, how do you inspire yourself?

First of all, I love the question, and I salute her for her curious mind that took her to the extent of thinking about it and asking it. Most knowledge -I believe- comes from great questions.

I have never thought about how to trigger or regenerate inspiration. It has always been a thing that happens if I’m lucky. But I do believe that everything can be analyzed to an extent, and you can manage to form an idea on how it works. My answer for now though will certainly be raw and incomplete. Here, I discuss 2 factors that I believe help me personally get inspired.Read More

A friend has recently asked me: “What inspires you?”. I kept putting the question off. Frankly, I don’t have an answer. Here, I come to my keyboard, trying to find one.

I asked Google: what is inspiration? “The process of being mentally stimulated to do or feel something, especially to do something creative” it said. What a beautiful definition. Keyword here is stimulation. What is stimulation, I asked. “The action of arousing interest, enthusiasm, or excitement in something”, Google answered. What a beautiful definition! So in essence, inspiration is the process that gets you to become mentally aroused and excited to take action.

When she asked me, I felt that I have mixed up the definition of inspiration and motivation, so what is motivation? Read More

Hi there,
Let me start by saying that I have never built an ecosystem before. But I have built a startup. And I believe that building an ecosystem is not much different than building a startup. In fact, the two have so many similarities that I will use startup analogy to explain how I think an ecosystem should be built.

I would define an ecosystem as an environment in which a startup can thrive by being able to operate with minimal friction. Such environment is originated by a source, often being an establishment aiming to create economic value out of it [the company]. In most recent cases, that source is a government trying to attract investments and increase jobs. That source can do so by solving a problem of inconvenience for a startup [the customer] to set-up, operate, and scale.

That establishment would set value hypotheses on the issues its customers are facing, along with potential solutions to them [leap of faith assumptions] and would try to test each solution through small experiments [minimal viable product].

A startup sometimes builds a community that maybe had never existed before and nurtures it until it can sustain itself, then it steps back and empowers the community, and watches it grow. As much as we’d love to believe that an ecosystem is formed organically, reality enforces that an establishment [i.e. government] has to take initiative and put building blocks for it.

A startup has to keep itself in check every day by getting feedback and data from its customers on how it’s doing. The startup must ensure that such feedback and data is true and accurate, not just customers saying what they want to hear. In fact, the startup must search for the criticism and points of improvement rather than compliments on what it has done right. In the same context, a government must do the same to its customers [i.e. startups] to ensure that it’s on the right track in proving the value hypotheses.

A startup doesn’t care for PR, page views, events attended, or other vanity metrics, but rather for actionable metrics that measure true results like purchases, subscriptions, or metrics that lead up to those. The same way, government must clarify its metrics while building an ecosystem. Is it Startups attracted? Investment funds established? Startup jobs created? In simple words, the results should be output, not activities leading to the output.

A startup can build the perfect product in a year, or launch a limited simple version in a month to test its leap of faith assumptions. If the startup invests too much money and resources in its initial product release, it might all go to waste as the team realizes that the customer doesn’t find value in the product, or that the problem isn’t as important as they thought. Exactly like that, governments should stop trying to solve the “big problems” with the perfect solutions, and start being shameless about launching minimal versions of programs, policies, and initiatives to test them and improve them with time. Build, Measure, Learn cycle must be enforced.

I can go on, but you get the point. These are the main problems I see with the process of building the ecosystem(s) I’m involved in. I’m not inventing anything new here. All the terminology used is based off of The Lean Startup methodology by Eric Ries. I think anyone who’s involved in building an ecosystem should read that book.