Show Up, Stick Around

The feeling of delivering a drastic improvement in revenue or cost for a client is a thrill. Having a near-perfect record of big wins makes selling easier. It took us a while to get a compendium of diverse results. Now that we are here, we must capitalize hard on it.

An advisor and mentor who has run sales at the highest levels says one of the most important things in sales is having a credible offering. The most important thing, he says, is Showing Up. So, the last two weeks have found me in Dubai, then India, then California. The next month, I will again be in India, Dubai, New York, preaching and repeating the data science + AI gospel and our results to anyone, client or partner, who will give me a meeting.

In the bay area, a friend had written a book that could define methodology in this area for the next generation, and I went to his book launch. He had also exited his previous venture very successfully, and the team announced their next one. It was an electric evening, full of energy, humour and camaraderie.

There was a person I had wanted to meet for 15 years now, someone who was responsible for several successful products at many of the biggest names in the valley, and I got the chance to see him in the week. I was delighted.

I caught up with all Euler’s angels and everyone was happy with progress. So, the bay area leg was going really well. I caught up with another exited entrepreneur friend, and we formulated a plan to create another firm seeded from Euler’s experience applying AI in an adjacent area. He dropped me off to my next meeting with a batchmate of my father’s, one of the biggest successes of his generation, who treated both of us to a fabulous Thai lunch, after which my friend drove me back in his convertible on 280.

Perfect day.

When I met the friend again the next day to figure out brasstacks for the firm, I was in high spirits and rattled off my thoughts. He participated, but after a while, he said, “Nautiyal, this is all great, but don’t take on so much stress. It will happen in good time. Don’t stress so much, get some sleep, eat better.”

He sounded like my father.

I understood he didn’t want to go full speed. I have learnt never to push anyone if they don’t want to accelerate. I replied, “What stress? Life is good. No hurry, of course, all in good time” and started talking of the thousand other things to catch up on.

He interrupted me, “I just learnt that my closest friend from college passed away last night from a heart attack.”

I had been talking incessantly for three days. No words came now.

We are in our early forties…

I mumbled... Sorry to hear… Kids? One son. Nine. Wife… doesn’t work.

He was forty-four! This is not the way it goes.

What will life be like for the child?

By the time he dropped me off to the next meeting, I had recovered and was back in pitch and sell mode. Next day, I met eight more people and among them was a social meeting with a friend who I hadn’t seen in years and was delighted to find in the bay area. He told me about possibilities for Euler at places he knew. Very promising. We caught up on family news. He mentioned a very close relative who had been diagnosed with... Wait, you said she was your… that is the same generation as you… how old? 34. She’s gone… Two months and gone. 3 year old and husband behind.

What will life be like for the child?

I was a starting to be perturbed, but the meetings were a torrent. And even tragedy, if at a step removed, is deferred by the brain for later processing.

Ray Kurzweil is known as the proponent of the idea of the Singularity, “the hypothesis that the invention of artificial superintelligence (ASI) will abruptly trigger runaway technological growth, resulting in unfathomable changes to human civilization”. The mainstream has started paying attention to AI and these related concepts only in the last few years, but Kurzweil’s dream of humanity and intelligence transcending its biological limitations has been in his mind for decades. In 2005, he wrote the NYT bestseller, The Singularity is Near and in his 2011 column, you may glimpse what drove him. He dreams of being able to download a person’s memories and identity and transferring it to silicon https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/futurist-ray-kurzweil-bring-dead-father-back-life/story?id=14267712

“I will be able to talk to this re-creation,” he explained. “Ultimately, it will be so realistic it will be like talking to my father.”

Kurzweil’s father, an orchestra conductor, has been gone for more than 40 years.

However, the 63-year-old inventor has been gathering boxes of letters, documents and photos in his Newton, Mass., home with the hopes of one day being able to create an avatar, or a virtual computer replica, of his late father. The avatar will be programmed to know everything about Kurzweil’s father’s past, and will think like his father used to, if all goes according to plan.

Today, I arrived back home after a week of travelling. An email in the inbox says there is some sad news from my son’s school. One of the parents, someone we knew, passed away from cancer. Sons, 13 and 11.

What will life be like for the children?

In the last few years as various scourges arrived at my parents’ doors, some defeated and one not, I would read Dylan Thomas’ poem to myself, cursing the good night.

Do not go gentle into that good night

Dylan Thomas, 1914–1953

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,

Because their words had forked no lightning they

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright

Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,

And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight

Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,

Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Powerful as the poem is, which Dylan Thomas wrote for his father when the father lay dying of pneumonia, the most poetic phrase above is not in the poem…

It is “Dylan Thomas, 1914–1953”.

Dylan died within a few years of his father's death, raging against it.

That’s what life is for the child. At its best, an obsessive battle against one foe, at its worst a gloomy descent into the abyss.

So, maybe, the best way to leave the children something of a shot at happiness is to Sleep early, walk a bit, read some books, cut the sugar and the vices and generally Stick Around.