Personal growth

Using LLMs for Problem Solving

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I’ve always been fascinated by the potential of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Claude. But it wasn’t until recently that I truly harnessed their power to solve my own day-to-day problems. The biggest thing I’ve been obsessed with recently has been using them to create new extensions that can then further improve my productivity.

One of my favorite hacks so far is using Claude to create new AutoHotkey (AHK) extensions. I don’t know how to do app development, except for knowing python, and basically Claude can do everything if you are patient enough to copy paste and correct whatever error it makes.

I set up this nifty little extension where if I use Windows + O, I can instantly send any selected text to Claude. This simple shortcut has transformed how I approach various tasks:

  1. Brainstorming in OneNote: I love using OneNote’s canvas capabilities for mind mapping and idea generation. Now, I can select a portion of my canvas, send it to Claude, and get instant feedback or suggestions to expand my thinking.
  2. Real-time Spanish translations: As someone living in Spain, I often encounter emails or texts in Spanish. Instead of switching between tabs or apps, I can now highlight the text, send it to Claude, and get a translation right in the email body. It’s seamless and saves me tons of time.
  3. Reflecting during daily planning: Perhaps my favorite use is during my morning planning sessions. I jot down my tasks and goals for the day, then send them to Claude for feedback. It’s like having a personal coach giving me a quick sanity check and sometimes offering suggestions I hadn’t considered.

Of course, like any tool, it’s not perfect. Sometimes Claude’s responses can be not too helpful. But overall, as a way to brainstorm and solve the blank page problem, it’s been a great help to me.

Making Big Decisions

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A podcast episode that I come back to every now and then is that on Transformative Experiences on EconTalk. The image that has stayed with me was when they talked about this hypothetical scenario of a man deciding whether he wants to turn into a vampire.

How do you even go about making that decision? Perhaps, you can calculate how much you would like the ability to turn into a bat versus the need to drink blood constantly. You may even ask for advice from other vampires about the pros and cons of their lives. An irreconcilable problem however is that becoming a vampire transforms you fundamentally. You cannot really imagine what being a vampire would be like unless you are already one. Becoming a vampire changes your preferences and transforms how you see the world. Similarly, the other vampires’ advice to you would be limited because they cannot anymore fully put themselves in your shoes as they are now thinking like a vampire.

A few months ago, I had the chance to finally become an assistant professor, something that I had always dreamt of becoming. It was a great opportunity. I would have great colleagues in a wonderful city. I would have my own travel funds and would be able to hire my own PhD student. I can do whatever research I was interested in. The only problem is that I would be away from my partner and it would also jeopardize my nationality procedure for Spain.

Making this decision was difficult as it would fully transform my life. I did many things. I started with a simple pros and cons list. I drew decision trees with expected values of various outcomes. I talked with my friends and mentors.

In the end, I decided to reject the opportunity and stay in my current position. It has been months now since I made the decision and honestly, every now and then, thoughts come to my head about whether I made a good decision. At the same time, I have been feeling too that if I made the move, maybe I would not also be happy.

But honestly, my biggest regret is that I spent too much time stressing about the decision instead of just making it and moving on. Recently, I listened to another podcast about making big decisions and I liked the idea of slow slow quick quick:

they took more time to gather the information, they took a bit more time to comprehend the situation, and then when it came to making the decision, they were much faster to be able to choose what the right option to them was.

Neil Shortland

My takeaway from this experience is that even when many decisions in life are difficult, things may work out either way because when you make the decision, you will be fundamentally transformed and thus, will make the best out of whatever path you choose. It might be best to just choose whatever decision resonates with you the most and find the best way to move forward.

Getting Back to Toastmasters

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Speaking has always been my number one weakness. I tend to talk too fast. I am always uncomfortable with silence, and so I always try to fill the gap. I tend to repeat words. I tend to do weird gestures. Speaking, whether in public or even just in small cocktail sessions, has kist never been natural to me.

If you google how you can improve this skill, one of the top recommendations you will see is to join a Toastmasters Club. It is an international club with chapters virtually everywhere that aims to help its members improve their speaking skills. In every session, there are prepared speeches, impromptu speeches and evaluation speeches.

My favorite part about Toastmasters is its openness and welcoming environment. With members having self-selected themselves, they tend to be highly motivated and driven yet also have the humility to recognize that they can still further improve. And so, the highlight of every session for me are the evaluation speeches, where members evaluate every aspect of the meeting from how it is organized to how many “uhms” people utter.

During my PhD, I was fortunate to have been part of Taste and Toastmasters in Amsterdam. The name comes from the fact that food is served in every session (which is unique to that club). I had a wonderful time there, learned tons of things and met some really close friends that I still keep in touch with to this day.

When I moved to Barcelona, I was too unmotivated to join TM once again. I felt insecure about my Spanish skills and so, I did not really think of rejoining. However, now that I’m three years in here, with my Spanish having sufficiently improved, I feel like now is the perfect time to reengage. I have two main motivations:

First, it would be a great opportunity to make new friends again. I just realized that having been a few years here in Barcelona, I’ve become too comfortable with my small social circle. I have not really gone out to make new friends. TM is the perfect opportunity to go out of my comfort zone again and to meet enthusiastic people.

Second, I feel that I have settled on my way of speaking in public. In my work, I have to teach students and deliver presentations on my research. I have settled on my current style and I feel like I need to push myself out there more to experiment and improve further how I connect with the audience.

Becoming kinder

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Yesterday, I was walking along Passeig de Gràcia with a new acquaintance. And all of a sudden, she asked me if we could stop and ask the homeless man on the street how he was doing. She said that she had seen him many times in the past and that he looked worse today. And that she was too shy to do it alone. So, I said yes and we spent the next half hour or so just chatting with the old man.

This small event really touched me and together with all the other encounters this week, it made me reflect on kindness. Years ago, my default assumption was that, until proven wrong, people are only kind because they have something to get out of you. It was not hard to develop that mindset, coming from a background where there is so much poverty and crime. I’ve had my laptop and phone stolen in the past. There were many times that people would try to help me (like helping me look for an item in a shopping district, helping me find a place when I was lost) but actually had other intentions. Due to all these experiences and all those I’ve heard from my other friends, it was just difficult to trust other people by default. If somebody is overly kind, you have to start suspecting. My instinct is to check my pocket if that stranger is taking my wallet already.

But, over the years, I’ve really changed. I’ve become kinder and more trustful of people. It has even surprised me that some colleagues comment how nice I have been to them.

Reflecting on it, one of the early reasons for this transformation was having met my girlfriend, who has been the kindest person I’ve met. But, more than her, I’ve been lucky to have experienced a lot of kindness from strangers since moving to Europe. Throughout my travels, there have been countless times that people helped me without asking for anything in return.

These days, I’ve been interviewing venture capitalists, accelerators, managers and CEOs. It still surprises me how generous they can be with their time and insights despite not receiving anything in return. I’m just a random stranger contacting them anyway. Similarly, I’ve met many academics who are just so kind in sharing their expertise and giving advice.

Not really sure how to end this piece. But, it just made me reflect also on the relation between nice-ness and success. It seems like they are not really independent. So far, the most successful people I’ve met have also been some of the nicest. There’s probably some study there that explains what causes what. Is it that richer countries / people can afford to be nicer since they don’t have to worry to much about certain things? Or is it that to be successful you have to be nice?

Ask me anything at Embiggen

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I have been the head of research at Embiggen, a corporate innovation and foresight consulting startup. It has been so exciting with our team growing and with us, getting our first clients. One cool initiative we had within the firm was to have an ask-me-anything and I was the first to take the stage. Let me share my answers to two questions that were fascinating:

What three insights in innovation can you apply to your personal life?

  • Organizational Ambidexterity – A fancy term to explain how successful organizations are able to manage both exploration and exploitation activities. Explore means knowing what options are out there and exploitation means capitalizing on opportunities when they emerge. For personal success, it’s also crucial to do these two activities. If you don’t explore enough, then you don’t know what you are missing. If you don’t exploit enough, then you are letting opportunities go to waste.
  • Path dependence – Organizations tend to get locked in a certain path, based on their previous decisions. A company manufacturing one product would find it hard to do something else, given that they have invested everything to make these operations efficient. Yet, this fixation can then be the cause of their future failure. Similarly, people tend to get locked in their routines, just doing what they are used to doing. It’s important to take note when one is getting stuck in one of these paths.
  • Legitimation – Technologies, no matter how novel and impactful they are, can still fail if they are not validated or perceived legitimate by important stakeholders. Similarly, no matter how good a person’s skills are, the market may not properly value their skills if they cannot get others to notice them. So, instead of just building on your skills, it’s important to find a way to demonstrate these skills.

What life advice can you give to university students?

I listed a couple of things I wish I had known earlier:

  • Reach out to people – The best way to find out about a career opportunity is to just message people who are in the positions you’d like to have. Don’t be afraid to send emails or Linkedin connections to people. Obviously, just don’t be too bothersome and try to provide some value in your message. It’s very low risk in general; the worst case is that they do not respond.
  • Learn by doing – Don’t spend months reading books and listening to lectures just to learn a new skill. Don’t expect to be an expert after all those efforts. Instead, the best way to learn something is by doing. Think of what you plan to do with the new skill and then work backwards from there. For instance, if you want to learn programming, start from the idea of the app you want to create and then figure out what modules you need to learn to get there.
  • CBT Basics – If there’s one topic I wish was thought in school, it would be the basics of cognitive behavioral therapy. People tend to have various distortions that impede them from reaching their potential. Just knowing the basic distortions can really help a lot of people deal with various anxieties they have.
  • Be more strategic – There’s always an easier path to any goal. You don’t have to give 100% to everything you do to get there. In many cases, it would be best to just focus on a few important tasks and just give the bare minimum to things that are not too critical.

Networking experiment

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As an extremely introverted person, I really find it difficult to network. Connecting with strangers really drains me. I do not like its transactional nature. And the truth is I am too much of a mess during small talk. I always feel awkward, afraid of running out of things to say. Networking cocktails still do not feel natural to me. I’m still trying to understand how to enter and exit conversations.

However, once I’ve connected with somebody, that’s the easy part. I can easily handle one-on-one coffees and just random chats. I like listening to people and trying to help them however I can.

This year, to force myself to “go out” more and create new relationships, I pushed myself to conduct an experiment. This experiment started from October, so about 3 months now. It was simple:

Every weekday, I would connect with one interesting stranger on Linkedin.

That’s it. Either I come across their profiles when they liked a post of a current contact or I come across one of their work that I found interesting. I tried to do it everyday but there were just some days when I just could not think of whom to connect with. I then connect with them with a personal note on why I would like to be their contact.

Since the experiment started, I’ve sent out invites to 56 people. Out of these, 47 have connected with me. Out of these 47, 8 sent a personalized response, typically thanking for connecting. Out of these 8, I’ve chatted with 3 people.

I think it’s been a successful experiment so far. For someone who barely used Linkedin to now connecting with one person every day, I think it’s a good achievement already. However, I had not been too deliberate about scheduling conversations with these people to get to know them better. For next year, my goal then is to increase my rate of personally connecting with newly formed connections.

Top-down and bottom-up learning

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In any skill you want to learn, it’s always useful to explore it from two views: bottom-up and top-down. The bottom-up approach starts breaking down the problem into components and then trying to understand how each of these building blocks fit. In contrast, the top-down approach starts from the big picture to get a good survey of the landscape and working down from there. It is advantageous to use these two lenses iteratively to ensure that you do not miss important considerations in decision making. Iterating through the two can help you converge to a better understanding of the field.

Let’s say that you are trying to learn a skill like programming. You can start by working top-down. This means that you try to get a general idea of what the skill entails. Perhaps, it is about trying to create a website. From day one, you then start creating the website. You learn the different skills involved in creating the site as you go along. If you want to put a yellow bar on top of the page, you google just to find how to do that. You look at the code of other websites to see how they implemented these features.

On the other hand, the bottom-up approach starts from learning how to code itself. You learn about the different functions, typically from a book or a guided lecture. After learning these building blocks, you then integrate them to larger components.

The challenge with the top down approach is that the learning process may seem too scattered that you may have some important gaps in your knowledge. While you may end up producing an output that “works,” it may all be based on bad foundations. In the end, the output you get may be in such a bad architecture that it may have to be redone again with experts who are well versed with the bottom up. However, the good thing about the approach is that you get something out of it quickly. You then get a mental picture of what you need to work on next. You create your own map of the learning journey you need to take.

On the other hand, the challenge with the bottom-up approach is the difficulty to motivate yourself to continue along. If you don’t see any product for a long time, you might just give up and see no point to studying the details. However, the bottom-up approach can be rewarding as you have a great understanding of each component. You do not see the field merely as a black box.

The two approaches require balance. You need to work top down to see how each component fits together. You also have to go bottom up to ensure that you know each component well enough.

Procrastination cycle

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I am prone to having periods where I am extremely productive and periods where I have to push myself to start working. It seems like I am always in one of those two modes, never just right.

While this has been an ongoing struggle, I have found ways to better cope with my tendency to procrastinate. The one that has made all the difference for me was learning more about the research on procrastination by the researcher Tim Pychyl. Instead of being a problem of time management or lack of discipline, his group’s research explains that procrastination is a problem with emotional regulation. Procrastination is due to some discomfort associated with a task. This framework  by the Centre for Clinical Interventions explains this best.

In their framework, they show that procrastination begins with a task or goal such as those related to work, family, health or self-development. However, even before we begin doing these tasks, we might have already made some assumptions, both correct and incorrect, about the task. These unhelpful rules include the fear of failure, the fear of catastrophe, having low self-confidence, wanting to seek pleasure, needing to be in charge and feeling depleted energy.  These assumptions then drive discomfort. Wanting to avoid these discomforts, we then think of excuses for delaying the task. We resort to doing something else more comfortable. The problem is that this creates both positive and negative feedback loops. On one hand, working on the unrelated task makes us feel better. On the other hand, avoiding the actual task gives us more discomfort and further reinforces our wrong assumptions. At some point, the actual negative feeling of the task is replaced by our associated negative feeling with the task. This then restarts the cycle of procrastination.

Document your journey

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One insight that I just thought of recently, that I should have probably done even before, is to document whatever grand, a long-term endeavor that I am currently pursuing. For instance, if you are writing a book, instead of just publishing everything in the end, it is better to just post parts of it online as you go through it. If you cut your book into parts and talk about it along the way, you can test in advance whether the idea you have makes sense. Perhaps, through comments by strangers online, you can already have a quick idea if the big goal that you are pursuing even makes sense. This is similar to the idea of the “minimum viable product”, where you try to create the smallest possible prototype of your product so that you can get feedback as soon as possible.

Especially, now that publishers are too risk-averse that they only want to bet on writers with already a following online, publishing parts of your book through a blog or talking about its parts through a podcast would be helpful as a way to gain an early following.

Another example are people who want to learn a new language. Many people make the mistake of spending all of their time just learning through apps or signing up in structured classes. Perhaps, they will even complete the entire track on Duolingo. However, by the end of it, many will realize that they did not really learn how to communicate. Completing these puzzles in an artificial environment is a completely different task compared to actually talking with a person, who speaks the language as their native one. Learners are probably better off to shift into “production mode” as early as they can. They can write blog posts in their language of interest. They can record videos and upload them to Youtube. They can even try to commit to giving speeches in their foreign language.

I remember when I was in Amsterdam, I was a member of the Toastmaster’s club. It is a club that helps to improve communication skills by letting its members give TED-like talks in front of others. My club was in English and it was filled with ex-pats. There was one member who wanted to improve her Dutch. She then joined another Toastmaster’s club but in Dutch. She gave speeches in Dutch to practice. By the end, she had improved so much that she even competed in the interclub competition in Dutch. If you know how ex-pats are like in the Netherlands, you would know that just a small amount of people actually end up learning Dutch.

So, celebrate the small wins. Document your learning journey. Even if you are a beginner, others who are a step or two behind you still can always learn from you.

Planning as a Hobby

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Browsing through productivity posts in Hacker News and productivity subreddits, it seems like planning has become a hobby for many people. Admittedly, this has also been a thing for me. I love conceptualizing grand plans for myself. I love reading strategies on the most efficient ways to achieve some goal. I love learning for others how they plan. I love designing dashboards to track my objectives.

For instance, I am pushing myself to write 300 words per day on two books that I wish to have finished. I’ve created a tracker on Excel. I track the number of words I write per day:

By tracking this, I can do some data analysis. I can track what is my actual rate of writing. I can track how many days will I finish given the projected number of words the books will have (my current estimate for the two is around 109,500). Finally, if I slack, how many words do I need to write for the current day to catch up.

The problem with me in general though is that planning has become a hobby to the point that sometimes I spend more time designing these trackers, instead of actually doing the actual work. Planning has been my way of procrastinating, of convincing myself that I am doing actual work instead of distracting myself.

I don’t really know how to end this post. But, I’m writing just to reflect on my tendency to fall into these habits.