I missed it at the gym. I used the “Intervals Pro” Watch app as a haptic timer for my HIIT workouts. It worked great because I would move among intervals by following taps on my wrist. I used the iPhone version of the app. It worked fine. I just had to turn the volume up.

I missed it when I did dictation. I used the Drafts watch app to dictate random thoughts and notes from audio content, such as podcasts and Audible books. I was able to do the same using the app’s widget on my phone. It worked just fine.

I missed unlocking my Mac and my iPhone with the watch. But Touch ID on the Mac worked well, and I have not gotten used to unlocking my iPhone with the Watch yet, so I was able to revert back to “pull-my-mask-down-and-unlock-phone” habit painlessly.

I used my phone to set timers. I only used timers while cooking. I didn’t miss timers on the watch.

I don’t miss the WhatsApp notifications. I need to observe this for a few more days.

I never checked my calories anymore. I knew I stood every hour so I never bothered to keep track.

So rationally, I really don’t need a watch.

Emotionally? I don’t know why I am still thinking about it.

“Dogfooding” means using you own products/services, so you get to understand what it is like to be your customers.

Facebook recently said it would permanently embrace remote work. “We’re going to be the most forward-leaning company on remote work at our scale.” Mark Zuckerberg made a seismic bet and forced everyone in his company to eat their “remote work” dog food ( 38th minute of the linked video). The bet- They fumble through the primordial chaos, new solutions and processes will emerge, and Facebook will transform itself into a remote-ready behemoth. Then, they will have all the dog food everybody needs.

Too far fetched? Early 2000s, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos issued a sweeping mandate– the entire company would only communicate through “service interfaces.” Allegedly, anyone who didn’t follow would be fired. The shift was vast, complex, and caused at lot of pain.

“… Over the next few years, Amazon transformed internally into a service-oriented architecture. They learned a tremendous amount while effecting this transformation …”

Eventually, all the learning culminated into AWS, the world number 1 cloud services platform which powers ~50% of the Internet.

Change is hard because it leads to failures. And failures are scary. 99% of us already know this.

The Jack Mas and Ray Dalios give us reasons and tips to bear-hug fear, and then every protagonist of any “zero to hero” movies explains to us, “It’s the fear of the unknown!”

Or is it?

We cannot really fear something we don’t know. It’s not that we fear the unknown. What we really fear, is the loss of the known.

What is the “loss of the known”?

• I got to where I am today because of how I did it.
• People like me because of the way I am.

“What we really fear, is the loss of the known.”

To give up doing things the way we know worked immediately means we don’t know what works anymore:

• “I spoke too fast in my presentations? I have been presenting this way my entire career and I am the General Manager!”
• “Listen more and speak less? My team loves me because of my wisdom!”

Yet in life, we are actually very okay with replacing perfectly good tools with better ones. We are very good with losing the known:

“I need to replace my wifi-router because my new home is bigger.”

So the loss of the known doesn’t have to be fearful. Change is merely replacing a screwdriver with a drill, and no one is asking us to throw the screwdriver away.