Show HN: Makers Laws – Buddhist Active Thinking to Create Software Products

Active thinking is being aware of a thought and trying to dissect the thought into its constituent parts. It's a lot like "Active Listening," except you are the only participant.

My book is called - Makers Laws - Convert Thoughts to Profitable Products.

There are three sources of my book:

My learnings from two profitable products I created (and 8+ failed ones). One of these (HandyTrain) is used by biggest enterprises in India to train their field forces - over 150K MAUs. Another one (GuitarStreet) was India's most popular online guitar store. We sold it in 2018.

Buddhist Texts - Mostly the exploration of "mindfulness of the self" (incorrectly interpreted as "mindfulness of the breath").

Term Logic of Aristotle - The methods involved in the dissection of the thoughts are inspired by this.

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Here's an excerpt:

Reality vs Imagination The hardest thing about creating products is distinguishing Reality from Imagination. We create an imaginary problem and fall in love with it. And we refuse to believe that it is not real.

As an example, read the following:

“I invented a model of the world that didn't correspond to reality and worked from that. I didn't notice my model was wrong until I tried to convince users to pay for what we'd built. Even then I took embarrassingly long to catch on. I was attached to my model of the world, and I'd spent a lot of time on the software. They had to want it!”

This hapless young founder, so attached to his “model of the world” is Paul Graham of YCombinator.

Yes, Paul Graham.

It is an excerpt from his blog - How to Get Startup Ideas

We are wired to believe that our version of the world is the real one. And it’s super hard to get rid of this.

But there is a trick.

Classify as everything you know, as imaginary.

Really.

This sounds a bit like ancient, religious texts convincing you that nothing is real. But that's not my suggestion here.

My suggestion simply is - assume that everything you know, is not real, but instead, is a theory. It is an exercise that will help you question everything.

We will later explore how to tie this up with Active Thinking and start to see things that you never would have thought existed.

Let us look at some of the most commonly held beliefs, and try to argue that they do not represent reality.

Instead of the word “imaginary”, I will use the word Theory. A theory is a plausible explanation of a pattern, and by definition, does not claim that it is real.

Here we go.

People hate it when you lie to them - Theory. What if they are in denial, and lies feed the denial.

People hate being sold to - Theory. What if they are looking for the product you are selling

Wars are bad - Theory. Wars may reorganize the human race, sometimes for the better.

And so on...

Finding the Axioms of your Thought I am not arguing that all the above statements are false.

I am arguing that anything, when seen as a theory, becomes “conditional". The moment you call something a theory, you think about exceptions - situations when that statement could be false.

Every time you do this, you discover the conditions needed for the statement to be true.

In the language of Mathematics, you discover the Axioms of the theory.---------------

Do let me know if you liked the topic and the excerpt.

I am not sure if people need this. So as an experiment, I have written the first 4 chapters only.

And I have opened it up for Pre-orders, to gauge whether this book should exist.

EDIT:

if you want to pre-order, use the discount code "showhn" (without the quotes) - created specifically for this community ️