Month: July 2012

Most of who I am today is because of the people I’ve met, worked and lived with. I’ve never believed in the concept of the ‘self made’ person. We are hardly ever self made. I love the quote –

‘The difference between us now, and us 10 years from now, are the books we read and the people we meet.’

The books I’ve read in the past 4-5 years have indeed had tremendous impact but even getting that habit in place has been thanks to push and encouragement I’ve received from people I’ve met.

As a family, thanks to the way circumstances panned out, we were always very connected with people on the outside of our family. It’s our friends who were with us at the time of crisis and it’s something I never forget. As a result, I’ve always had, and to the best extent possible, done my best to maintain close relationships with those life has been kind to connect me with – friends, teachers, ‘wiser’ friends who’ve taken an interest in my development, colleagues and the like.

People, however, tend to be complex beings and there are times when I find myself frustrated with one close person on the other. I ask myself – ‘Why can’t she be more like him?’ or ‘Why can’t he be more like her?’.

And, while it’s easy to get sucked into this, I’ve realized over time that all I’m doing is placing an unfair expectation on someone I care about. First up, I’ve learnt to accept (slowly!) that people are in our lives for a reason, a season or a lifetime. The ones who are around for a ‘season’ or period of time are the tougher to let go. But, I’ve come to realize that disengaging and getting out of touch (in this day and age, especially) is a choice and relationships are two way games.

Second, every one of those who are in it for a life time have a unique role in our lives. While they all might love and care for us, they likely express it in different ways – some might do so by being our ‘soft place to land’ and by affirming us and making us feel good, yet some others might do so by challenging us, pushing us and helping us be better people and so on. None of them is right or wrong.  It’s this tension that makes our lives special.. (In fact, if there is one thing that is extremely helpful – it is to surround ourselves with people with very different strengths and traits!) What matters, though, is that we engage people for the right thing.

We start feeling frustrated when we go to someone who is incredibly helpful directionally for specific objective advice, or when we go to someone who generally pushes our boundary and challenges us, for affirmation. In the ideal world, there would be people capable of all of this but that’s never the case. Every person has their own strengths. And it’s our responsibility to engage those we love on their strengths.

I am always reminded of a wonderful Paolo Coelho story when I think of close relationships.

When many animals were dying due to the extreme cold of the Ice Age, a group of porcupines decided to huddle close and keep warm. The moment they huddled close, their thorns began scratching each other. The moment they stayed apart, they started freezing to death again!

So they had to make a choice: either vanish from the face of the earth or accept each other’s thorns. They wisely decided to stay together again. They learned to behave courteously, overlooking the small wounds that closeness causes, because the most important thing was the warmth given by the other.

What more can I say..

This week’s book learning is from ‘Talent is Overrated’ by Geoff Colvin (Please click for prequel learnings 1 and 2).

Jerry Rice was average by NFL’s (high) athletic standards. Average build, average speed – good, but nowhere near extraordinary. He only received a sports scholarship from a small college in Mississippi, but went on to make every All America Team. Despite that, there were very few NFL teams willing to pick him and eventually, the San Francisco 49ers took a chance on him.

For a person with few seeming NFL attributes, Jerry Rice went on to become arguably one of the greatest players of all time. Not only was he exceptional in his Wide Receiver position, he was a virtual ‘iron man’ – in a position that’s known for injury, Jerry Rice only missed 14 weeks in his 20 season career.

What made Rice so good? In Rice’s case, everyone agrees that the answer is practice.

Jerry’s famous 6 days a week off season work out meant that he spent roughly 20,000 hours practicing over the course of his 20 year career.. out of which only he only played 150 hours i.e. only 1% of time spent on football was actually playing!

In short, Jerry worked harder on his football skills than any other NFL player did.

Photo by Ryan

I found that to be an incredibly inspiring statistic. Out of every 100 minutes doing what he did, Jerry Rice only spent 1 minute actually playing football.

But, here’s where it gets fascinating – was it JUST hard work? Would we all become like Jerry Rice if we worked as hard on football? Do look out for the answers to these are in the final edition of this 4 part series next week..

Here’s to practicing real hard for our presentations, meetings and tests day this week!

I sometimes wonder if most of the institutions we have dreamed up as human beings exist to fill that gap, that massive emptiness created by a lack of purpose.

I find these institutions to be of 2 kinds – the ‘bigger than yourself’ institutions i.e. religion, organized sports where you are part of something bigger than yourself and the ‘keep me busy enough so I don’t notice’ kind that involves everything we do to avoid getting ‘bored’ regularly – regular socializing and maybe, most work?

As developed as we are as a race, it’s amazing that we still ask ourselves ‘What should I do now to feel better?’, ‘What kind of job will make me happy?’, ‘What should I do different?’ – as if ‘what’ ever gave us the answer.

Perhaps we should just stop asking and listening to ‘what’ questions for a week. And replace them all with ‘why’.

Why am I not feeling good? Why am I not happy with what I do? Why am I always looking for something different to do? Why do I work?

Of course, it’s scary. And of course, most attempts will give us the wrong answers.

But, the way I see it, it’s better to attempt to solve the right questions than to spend a lifetime solving the wrong ones..

I have noticed a trend when I attempt to bring about change in myself. Every change goes through a very definite cycle.

Thought -> Decision -> Action -> Result

And this never changes. There are times when I read something, mull it for ages before acting on it. For example, the Godin advice on changing the first thing I do every morning from consumption (checking feeds, email) to production like blogging was out there in January. It’s practically been in the ‘thought’ phase for a long while. Not actively, but sub consciously. And finally, as of 3 days ago, I decided to throw it out.

What changed? Frustration and annoyance came into the picture. I found myself annoyed at passively taking in information first thing at the morning. The learning came to mind. Okay. No excuses. Time to change.

As a result, I find the change from thought to decision critical in bringing about change and in my case, that frustration and annoyance at myself. This was a comparatively smaller decision, of course. Every 2-3 months, I am pushed to make a big change in my self management game for some reason or the other. Sometimes, it’s to wind down, other times it’s to wind up and in day before yesterday’s case, it was to reduce the number of focus points because there was simply too much to do in a day and I was getting overwhelmed.

Change is good. But, change is hard. And I go through the same process (when I really want to push for change, these typically take a week each). And the breakthrough is typically the day when I’m really frustrated and annoyed with myself.

I felt that frustration and annoyance on Tuesday. And, for a change, I was very happy in my heart of hearts because I sensed imminent change. It bubbled for a while.. and then the change came. My daily focus list was brutally cut down to the most essential tasks until the end of October. I am still moving from decision to action but I’ve gone through the most difficult part of the change curve and I’m more confident of moving things along now.

The biggest ability we humans have compared to animals is the ability to observe ourselves and take an outside view in a situation where we are very involved in. It really is a fascinating ability because that’s the ability that gives us the deepest learnings.. learnings about ourselves.

When I started out reading AVC, a daily blog by venture capitalist Fred Wilson, I used to be critical about typos. There was typically one every post and I used to point them out in the comments once a while. Those were the days when I only blogged ‘long form’ occasionally. Now that I do a ‘long form’ post a day, I have all sympathy for typos. I think I have one a day, too! You’ve got to feel the pain.. :-)

The idea of structuring topics by days of the week (Eg: Work Hacks Wednesday) also comes from the structure I see him adopt. He does MBA Mondays and Fun/Feature Fridays. I can see the benefit. It helps simplify blogging every day. And now, for the first time, I’m copying another Fred Wilson feature – a series! And funnily, it was because I was wondering how I would cover the very useful topic of ‘structuring’ in a post. And, of course, the series idea made perfect sense..

How does this relate to structuring? Structuring, in my mind, is breaking things down to digestible/comprehensible chunks to help ourselves and others understand the situation at hand and what we/they need to do.

So, structuring in the case of an ambiguous thing like daily blogging is adding bits of consistency like a work hack every Wednesday or an interview every fortnight. That sounds an awful lot like organization, of course but it isn’t. Structuring is a lot more than just organization. It’s an approach, a way of thought that translates into what we do. And most importantly, it is one that can be learnt.

I feel structuring, as a skill, is underrated and is one that should be taught in schools. While we love emphasising people who get things done, getting things done effectively always involves upfront structuring. In essence, it’s operationalizing what Stephen Covey describes as ‘Begin with the end in mind.’

Of course, I’m not claiming to the most structured person around by any means but I’ve learnt a lot over the past few years or so thought I would put down some ideas that help me structure –

1. Verbal Communication
2. Written Communication
3. Presentations
4. Projects
5. Thought

Any other requests/ideas for the series is, of course, welcome.

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I am experimenting writing without the traditional image. Thanks to nudges from William and Nishanth and reading this blog post on using images from Google Images, I am contemplating stopping using images altogether. Thoughts on this are much appreciated as well!

One of the habits that’s been on my mind as one ripe for change is my habit of waking up by looking at ‘Reeder’ and ‘Gmail’ on my iPhone. My excuse is that it is the easiest way to wake up with no snooze alarms.

Essentially, my excuse results in content consumption first thing in the morning.

Image Source: Rick

I remember a Seth Godin post from ages ago on the first thing you do when you sit down at your computer.

If you’re a tech company or a marketer, your goal is to be the first thing people do when they start their day. If you’re an artist, a leader or someone seeking to make a difference, the first thing you do should be to lay tracks to accomplish your goals, not to hear how others have reacted/responded/insisted to what happened yesterday.

It’s time to change this. Thanks Seth.

I am bullish about a couple of things –

– If you work hard, stay focused and dedicated, good things always lie ahead.

– The best times ALWAYS lie ahead.

– You never peak. In fact, like U2 believed, you are always ‘arriving’ as a phenomenon.

– If you are building things for others… even if you don’t manage to change the world as you imagined it, you definitely changed yourself and made a dent that you likely cannot even see.

There’s probably a few more on the ‘bullish’ list. But, these 3 things I strongly believe.

Optimism, at the end of the day, is a world view after all. It’s a preference. It’s a belief system we pick. And this is how my belief system works.

I’ve come to believe that beliefs have the power to change more than we give them credit for. Think Steve Jobs. Think Henry Ford. We spend a lot of time ‘doing’ things and I find it’s vital to think about what we believe every once a while.

The ‘What’ derives itself from the ‘Why’ at the end of the day.

‎’Sometimes you have to stop worrying, wondering or doubting. Have faith that things will work out, maybe not as you have planned, but that’s just how it’s meant to be.’

This week’s book learning is from ‘Talent is Overrated’ by Geoff Colvin.

Last week, we looked at the study in Berlin that examined 3 groups of students in their mid 20s – the ‘good’ group who practiced 9 hours solo every week and the ‘better’ and ‘best’ groups that practiced 24 hours solo every week at school.

So, what separated the two top groups? Was it raw talent?

For this, we would have to examine the average ‘lifetime’ practice time of the students in this group. The researchers dug into the number of hours each of these groups had spent with their violins before age 18.

Group 1 – Good: 3420 hours
Group 2 – Better: 5301 hours
Group 3 – Best: 7410 hours

The date, of course, says it all..

Excellence, essentially, is cumulative! It’s achieved one day at a time over a very long period. This story seems to take away all the mystery around the concept of ‘Talent’. But, I was left with more questions than answers and I assume you are too.

Specifically, maybe this is the case in case of violinists – does it then apply to fields like sports where raw talent seems everything? Stay tuned for the answer to that question. Coming up next week.. :-)

Here’s to putting in the hours of practice in our chosen fields every day this week!