Customer friction is a huge part of running a biz.

How hard is it to engage a company to work with you?

Data-driven companies obsess over reducing this friction.

Mom-and-pop operators SUCK at this and it’s costing them millions.

Here’s what I’ve learned 👇👇👇

Secrets of Ganapati (Author - Keshav Sitaram Thackeray)

This article is taken from Keshav Sitaram Thackeray's book 'Dharmachi Devale and Devalcha Dharma'. In it, Bal Thackeray's father is claiming how the Hindu deity of Ganesha is imaginary.
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Buddha is Ashtavinayak and "Ganapati Bappa Morya" is "Chandragupta Morya".

In the era of democracy, the head of state is the President. But in ancient India, there was a Gana culture in the monarchy and the head of that Gana was called Ganapati
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In ancient India, a prince named Siddharth Gautam was born in royalty. He later became the king of Shakya Gana in this Gana culture. In time, Siddhartha attained enlightenment.

Let us now understand the difference between a real Ganapati and an imaginary Ganapati.
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Some clever Brahmin manuvadis made the real Ganapati the imaginary Ganapati.

Buddha was the king of the Shakya Gana, so people called him Ganaraja. He founded Buddhism and became the head of the Shakyas. As the head of Gana, people used to call Buddha as Ganapati.
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But the Brahmins Brahmanized Ganapati and created a false Ganapati. When Buddha used to give the message of Dharma to the people, two words would come out of his message. Chitta and Malla.

Chitta is the body.
Malla means waste
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The Ife Primary Education Research Project (1970-1983).

aka

The Ife 6-Year Primary Project.

In 1970, as the Director of the Institute of Education of the then University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife), later Dean Faculty of Education, Prof. Babs Fafunwa & his team embarked on one of the most groundbreaking research projects in education for Yorubaland.

The aim of the project was to test the hypothesis that the best instructional medium for good concept formation at a very tender age is the mother tongue.

This was bolstered by the observation that “of all the continents and peoples of the world, it is only in Africa…

…that formal education is offered in a language that is foreign to the child.”

So, Yoruba was to be used & tested as an exclusive medium of passing information or instructions to a set of pupils.

The project was based on the premise that:

(a). the child will benefit culturally, socially, linguistically & cognitively.

(b). the child’s command of English will be improved if he is taught English as an entirely separate subject by a specialist teacher through the 6 years.

1 There's a chasm between an NLP technology that works well in the research lab and something that works for applications that real people use. This was eye-opening when I started my career, and every time I talk to an NLP engineer at @textio, it continues to strike me even now.

2 Research conditions are theoretical and/or idealized. A huge problem for so-called NLP or AI startups with highly credentialed academic founders is that they bring limited knowledge of what it takes to build real products outside the lab.

3 A product is ultimately a thing that people pay for - not just cool technology or user experience. But I’m not even talking about knowledge gaps in go-to-market work. I'm talking purely technical gaps: how you go from science project to performant + delightful user experience.

4 Most commoditized NLP packages solve well-understood problems in standard ways that sacrifice either precision or performance. In a research lab, this is not usually a hard trade-off; in general, no one is using what you make, so performance is less important than precision.

5 In software, when you’re making something for real people to use, these tradeoffs are a big deal. Especially if you’re asking those people to pay for what you’ve made (can’t get away from that pesky GTM thinking). They expect quality, which includes precision AND performance.