July 2012 – Page 3 – A Learning a Day

Work Hacks Wednesdays: Follow up, Follow Up, Follow Up

I have a formula for doing great work. 3x Prep followed by Action followed by 2x Follow Up. (the ratios are subject to change based on future experience, of course! :-))

Essentially, every bit of action requires at least 3 times the preparation and 2 times the follow up. So, a (good) 1 hour meeting would typically require 3 hours prep and 2 hours follow up. If it’s higher, I wouldn’t be surprised.. but I am always very surprised if it’s less than this.

The interesting fact here is that more people prepare than follow up. Preparation comes naturally to us simply because this concept is drilled in while we are in school. We can prepare for exams but how in the world do we follow up? Why follow up?

Follow up is the real deal, the real differentiator. Even before we invented a 100 different mediums of communication, a lot more was said than done. You can imagine what the ratio looks like in this day and age. Besides, given the fast pace of our lives, we forget very often to do the small things – say thank you, send a gift, wish people on their birthdays and the like and that’s not cool either.

So, what does follow up really mean? To me, there are 2 key aspects –

1. Making and keeping commitments. There are whole books written on this topic. I love Stephen Covey’s take on this – he very simply calls this integrity. The word ‘integrity’ comes from ‘integer’, which in turn means whole and in this case, consistent. This is more often than not a character trait.

That said, we can of course work on habits like ‘over commitment’ or ‘under commitment’. I am generally on the over commit side and yesterday’s post is a hack/habit that could help me greatly!

2. Doing the small (nice) things. This means saying thank you, writing thank you notes (on paper), remembering people’s birthdays, sending them gifts if you know them well or have a special reason to thank them and in general, being nice and treating people the way you would like to be treated.

These sound like simple things but being a follow up ninja helps a great deal and tends to open more doors that one can imagine.

And it serves as a nice reminder to me to make sure I do both of these consistently.

Hell Yeah or No

I am a Derek Sivers fan. I was 50% there when I saw his wonderful TED talk on ‘How to start a movement’ and was 100% there when I saw his wonderful Book Notes page!

Of late, I’ve been checking his blog posts and videos out sporadically and one of the 1 minute videos that really resonated was the one about ‘Hell Yeah’ or No.

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I tend to be over committed more often than I like to admit and I find it very hard to say ‘No’ when I’m not sure myself if it is indeed a ‘No’ internally. His approach, of course, flips it around and it’s one I’m applying bit by bit these days. If it ain’t a ‘Hell yeah!’, I’m working hard to make sure I say ‘No!’. This is not easy and is work in progress but I’m certain I’ll get better at it.

There is no doubt in my mind that it’s the right thing though. It reminded me of a learning I’d posted ages ago – ‘Never say yes when you want to say a no.’

Really cool advice. Thanks Derek!

Changing a One and Half Year Old Habit: The Side Table Story

I am very excited to share a small success story today. More than anything else, this blog is all about ideas and it’s a great day when some of these ideas become reality.

The Backstory. I generally have a ‘wind down’ routine at the end of the day. Unplug internet, dinner, switch off laptop, guitar, <>, sleep. The <> denotes the last activity before switching on my beloved sleep cycle alarm clock and going to bed. For about one and a half years now, that’s been playing 10 minutes of games on the iPhone. It’s a habit I’ve been wanting to change but haven’t done anything about.

Desired Behaviour. One of the many changes that have come post my recent Himalaya Trek has been an urge to read more and exercise more. I spend roughly 30 minutes every weekday listening (typically) to books and most of these tend to be non-fiction/non-light. And I’ve been wanting to get back to some ‘light’ reading but haven’t been able to find time. This 10 minute end of day slot would be ideal.

So, desired behaviour has been established. The funny thing is that I’ve always had books on the side table next to my bed but never used it.

Switch. One of the principles from that wonderful book about driving change, Switch, came to mind. ‘Create a path of least resistance’ echoed in my head.

One look at my side table and I knew the problem. I didn’t have a table lamp! D’oh! When I did read before going to bed (rare occasion), I would walk up to my work table, take the table lamp out and bring it to the side table. This took work. It was the end of the day and I felt lazy. So, I never did it.

Of course, I promptly got myself a little table lamp.

Result. Voila! It’s been about 18 days now and I’ve been reading with no problems. Funnily, I’ve realized it’s so much of a mind thing. About 12 of these 18 days have been spent in hotel rooms and yet, the momentum has continued.

My Learnings.

– We are often just a step away from creating change in our lives. We are generally well aware of the current situation, we know what we want but we lack the insight to get us to where we want to go. A bit of thought or a bit of help from an external person – that’s all we need.

– Small changes tend to inspire big(ger) ones. I am inspired to bring about a bigger change – I’m eye-ing a standing desk at home. Leg work has already begun.. Baby steps matter.

– Change smells really really good. As Gandhi said, we ought to be the change we want to see in the world.

– We are never too set in our habits to change. The hardest part in all of this is a will to change. A big part of the game is indeed played in the mind.

Happy Monday! Here’s to making some small changes (a la how can we read/exercise/walk a bit more?) in our lives this week and celebrating when we succeed in making those changes.

On Peaks, Ends and Great Memories

This week’s book learning is from ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’ by Daniel Kahneman.

A member of Daniel Kahneman’s audience at a lecture once relayed an experience of listening to a very good 40 minute symphony on a CD that was badly scratched right at the end. So, it produced a shocking sound right at the end for a few minutes and this in turn resulted in a bad memory of the experience.

Effectively, the memory of experience ignored 40 good preceding minutes and favored remembering the ending. And this finding has been found to be consistent with multiple experiments. For example, people remembered painful procedures more positively if the pain was lessened towards the end. (even if the overall experienced pain was the same!)

Kahneman explains that this is because we have 2 selves –

The Experiencing self i.e. Does it hurt now? How do you feel now?

The Remembering self i.e. How was it as a whole?

In our own lives, our remembering self keeps score, decides what we learn from situations and if our memories are positive. And generally, all the remembering self cares about is the ‘peak’ of an experience and the ‘end’.

I found this to be one of the most applicable learnings I’ve read in a very long time. We may not be able to make time for a long enough vacation or a long enough family reunion/get together with friends but if we do design these trips or gatherings with a very cool ‘peak’ experience (eg: a celebration) and a wonderful ‘end’ experience, then we would create lovely memories for ourselves and those around us..

And I don’t think it’s all that different for business meetings – a peak and a cool end. Really cool concept!

Here’s to creating meaningful memories for ourselves this week!

Don’t Do List

I’ve been thinking a bit about ‘Don’t do’ lists. A lot of the recent psychological research seems to focus on keeping it positive – focus on strengths, build from strengths, focus on what to do rather than what not to do etc.

So, despite having read about these multiples times, I wasn’t drawn enough to the idea to think about testing it out. A few days ago I came across this interesting insight from the FLIP manifesto by Dan Pink that has re-ignited the thought.

Dan Pink points out that probably the most famous and enduring list of all time is the list of Ten Commandments God handed Moses. And 8 out of the 10 commandments were Don’t do’s.

How’s that for a compelling argument?

Have you tried ‘Don’t do/Stop doing lists? What has your experience been? (Of course, I’m making the big assumption that you are a lists person. I realize lists are not everybody’s cup of tea..)

Looking forward to your thoughts/comments/suggestions..

I Am Happy That You Are Happy

A friend sent me this lovely story from Chicken Soup for the Soul that I thought I’d share.

21 year old Mo was at his father’s 4th wedding. In each of the previous re-marriages, Mo knew all along that the wife-to-be was not the best for the dad and and with every marriage, he was only getting increasingly frustrated. This time, he hadn’t even bothered with meeting his dad’s new wife.

While at the the wedding, he was constantly complaining to his friend about how this was just likely to be futile. He knew his father would ask him to give a speech and he was dreading it because he was at ‘explosion point.’

That’s when his friend said, ‘We can’t always like what our close ones do, we just have to support them through the tough times and in times like this, it just helps to say ‘I’m happy that you are happy.’

‘I’m happy that you are happy.’

Deep and meaningful. I loved it.

The Importance of Being Busy on the Wrong Things

“Prioritize”, “Spend time on things that add value”, “Focus on the important things”, “Don’t work hard, work smart”, “Never do anything that isn’t very important’.

In one way or the other, we hear this, or similar, advice touted in the form of blog posts, talks and advice. This is what every successful person seems to owe his/her success to.

Bah. This is the kind of advice that causes decision paralysis in my view.

Here’s my take.

First, get busy. Get really busy. Really really busy. Commit to more than you can deliver, get stretched and fail. Get busy without over-thinking it. Don’t bother if it’s the right thing. Get busy on doing unimportant things, if necessary. Just get busy.

Once you are in the habit of taking action, you’ll automatically begin filtering all the wrong things out and begin to focus on the right things. It’s trial and error. You don’t just wake up one morning and realize all the ‘right’ things.

You learn football by going out and kicking a ball, and not by thinking about it.

There is no way out of making mistakes. There is no way out of failing. So, fail lots. Do the wrong thing many times. And your judgment will get better over time. It’s called experience.

‘Success comes good judgment. Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment.’

Work Hacks Wednesdays: Level 1 – Diligence

Thanks to a great discussion with a wiser friend the other day, I have finally learnt what the first qualification level test at work is – Diligence.

Diligence is defined as careful and persistent work or effort i.e. it comes down to attention to detail and persistence.

In my case, I typically do okay on persistence and have my struggles with attention to detail. And I tend to remember what a wiser colleague said to me once –

‘It’s great to have initiative and social skills. But, what matters most to me is someone who never drops a ball (i.e. diligence). The rest is great, but supplementary.’

The bottom line – you simply need to pass the diligence test before you graduate to level 2. And one of the quotes that repeatedly comes to mind is

‘We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit.’

Aristotle was a really wise man.

No Shortcuts

I’ve been going through a very intense period the past few days. An easy measure of that is the fact that I’ve hardly managed to speak to family. That’s saying something. The other easy measure is that I had to spend a few minutes today picking my learning for the day. I generally decide in 30 seconds but today, it took 5 minutes.

So, I decided to go with a learning that popped up in my head twice in the past week. I met with a wise friend yesterday who had just completed one month in a new job. He spoke of ‘long days’ as he was getting settled in his new role and remarked ‘There really is no other way to do it. You just have to dive right in.’

The other experience that I had a couple of days back was when I was taking part in a fun competition. Our team decided to do a video as our entry and as we just had an hour during the day, we were up from 11.30pm to 3.30pm to the get the thing done. We didn’t win but we knew we gave a very good shot and I personally had the satisfaction that we didn’t cut any corners.

There was no other way to get it done though. We just had to clock in the hours. Of course, most of us hadn’t slept for days but it really didn’t matter – the desire to get a great piece of work done was stronger. At the end of the day, it’s about doing the right thing, doing the best and making it count. There is no easy, only right.

There are no shortcuts. Just ask Barclays Capital..

Daniel Ha, CEO and Co-Founder of Disqus: Interview 21 – Real Leader Interviews

I am a huge fan of Disqus. It is my commenting system of choice and it’s one of those products I cannot stop recommending. I can count up to 8 bloggers who switched to Disqus thanks to my recommendation – I can’t think of too many other products I evangelize as much.
Disqus was co-founded by Daniel Ha. Along with close friend Jason Yan, he founded this online discussion and commenting service for websites, while at UC Davis and I was obviously delighted to have had some of his time for a very insightful 30 minute discussion.

About Daniel: Daniel is the CEO and co-founder of Disqus, a company he co-founded with close friend Jason Yan in 2007. Disqus is based in San Francisco and is a small but quickly growing company that aims to improve conversations online. Today, the Disqus commenting platform is used by it’s 79 million users across some of the largest sites on the web.

Rohan: What is the back-story of Daniel the person?

Daniel: Disqus is my first company and it is also my first job. I did techno internships when I was in college and had a number of other jobs. However, as far as out of school concerns Disqus is my first project. That’s the same story wit my co-founder. We started Disqus while we were still in school. We loved building things and we moved straight into crossing all the hurdles that come with working with larger companies. Very soon we found out that we were really interested in pursuing Disqus!

Rohan: Where did you grow up? What is your personal story?Daniel: I grew up in San Francisco in the Bay area. It is right next to Silicon Valley, San Jose. My father worked with tech companies on the finance and business side of things. He gave me the opportunity to learn about companies out there! I was really inspired by that.

I guess that’s like growing up in Hollywood and seeing movie and music studios all around you, being right in the middle of it. That’s how I never knew any other life from tech. I also realised that some people do not have this kind of an opportunity.
I was always into computers and technology. I started working with computers very early on, between the ages of 7 and 9 years. I started with simple programming. I started using the web a little bit after middle school. When I was 13 maybe 12 I met another little boy named Jason, who ended up being my co-founder in Disqus. We met in an advanced algorithm class in middle school. The first thing we ever did together was to play Star Craft. We got together to build a website which was a way for us to share music. This was probably around 1997, which was a little bit before peer-to-peer got popular!

We got a lot of online forums and discussion boards. Apart from that we were the nerdy kids in school, so we were able to work these projects! Through out though high school we were not as close and we lost touch for a while. We reconnected and went to the same college at University of California, Davis. It is outside of Bay Area, north of California. We did Computer science and Engineering. It was almost like we picked up stuff from our 13-14 year old selves. Now we were 18-19 and we had started working together!

Over the couple of years we did a lot of micro projects and I think a big driving factor was that we were really bored in school. A lot of the science classes were already done for us. So we did a lot of unrelated things before we finished up school.

I really did not like Chemistry. In the end I had this one class to take for graduation. We felt we had learnt everything there was to learn. And we realised there was a lot of opportunity waiting for us. We started Disqus in 2007 and started making it a company really in 2008!

Rohan: So what was the inspiration for starting Disqus? To improve your own blog or for blogs in general?Daniel: I am a non-blogger. I would not pretend to know much about this. Thinking back I had read a lot of blogs, but I never had one myself. Disqus started as a way for us to take what we know about good online communities from all the time we spent on message boards, RC Channels and other micro communities that exist all over the web to talk about movies and music. We wanted to link up all these small communities were we end up making a lot of friends over common topics. We wanted Disqus to be a new way for discussion platforms to work. So Disqus became something that was not only better software but understood how communities interacted.

One of the initial ideas was to make this completely network based. Say I was on a particular network and I talked about something in which I was a complete badass knowing all there was to know. And when I travelled to something completely different like say video games, they are not exactly the same communities, but a lot of cues about my contribution existed. And so we started off with this project and called it Disqus. One of the things that we did was look at the way it worked.

We figured out a way to put a microform that embedded into the website itself. At that time I was going to start another blog. I have started lots of blogs but I have never really kept up with them in the form of blog posts. Disqus was an excuse for me to say if I disconnected with my blogging I would still like to keep my engagement around. So we simplified the process and over time it looks just like comments and nothing else. So what started off as a discussion platform became a comment system and now we are on a path to go back to discussion platform.

Rohan: What is the vision ten years from now for Disqus?Daniel: I look at the web today where there are a lot of huge answers on social networking. That is because we have a lot of personal information about people, which makes a lot of transactions and exchanges very authentic. I can buy something online and I can have a good sense of who you are. That’s the sort of dimension that has opened up. It has created a lot of excitement by making everything more social and interactive. I think that’s a very cool thing.
It really does make you think about where that ticks and how that makes the audience to relate to the true philosophies of web. When I got familiar with the Internet and the web, it was a lot of exchange of ideas and thoughts. Now days it’s mostly about people who are defined by the ideas they share. I sort of think Disqus as a place for web communities were discussions still matter.

Independent publishers and bloggers are struggling because while they have great content, they need to do something more to give a unique experience to their user. Some people do that by creating a brand image. The newsletters and publishers have their own stamp.

All we want to do is help the small communities create their own mark and space. When you are creating a community you are creating a nightclub or a bar or a lounge where people comment. They like people not because they know them from another life, but because they like the same content and exchanges. Bigger brands like Fox News, or CNN have an image, which resonates.
We certainly don’t want to take and own the concept of commenting. There is discussion happening everywhere on the phone, on the web, on the television and on the street and we want to help build communities that are super strong.

Rohan: You are a Silicon Valley boy. What inspires and drives you?Daniel: Lot of things inspire me personally and that’s because of people around me. I think I am inspired by the things people do. I am really fascinated on a macro scale about technology being commoditised. I should explain that a little bit!

Right now in Silicon Valley, San Francisco everything is considered a technology company. Maybe you are creating a new way for transportation or you are creating a new way for digital avatars to have conversations, or new ways of commenting. If you think about it, it’s interesting because 100 years ago, companies were electric companies? If you used electricity you were unique and that was your classification.
Right now we use technology and we can’t really be tech companies right? I am really excited about where this whole thing is headed. Just understanding that as a whole, we are not just building technology companies. It’s just a commoditised thing. People would build on what we are doing right now. I am really excited about what the next two generations of people using Internet would make out of it! That’s what drives me! What I am doing today with Disqus has a potential to shape the Internet and the way things function. We want a scenario where Internet is being taken for granted. Right now the infrastructure is still being built. The walls are still being built. And we are in it shaping someone’s foundation!

Rohan: Who would say are mentors who have inspired you?
Daniel: This might sound a little cheesy but my long time role model has always been my dad. He got me into pretty much anything I was interested in like cars and computers. A lot of his work ethics and his view on technology inspire me. I still talk to him about all these things. He’s always been a very curious person – making sure that I had access to gadgets and electronics. It has given me an incredible opportunity to get things I have always wanted to.
Other sources of inspirations are living in this area – where I am constantly surrounded by entrepreneurs of all areas and ages with different drives – all of whom really care about what they are doing. You can’t help but feel a bit lazy in comparison to them. So you always work a bit harder to achieve a little more.
We did something called Y Combinator. We met a lot of great guys at YC and our current neighbours are from YC as well.

Otherwise, I like Henry Ford as a person – his views on industries and what that means for people and companies. His impact has been far reaching.
Rohan: Was there a defining moment in this entire journey? Or was it just a gradual evolution?
Daniel: We had a bunch of major milestones along the way. I would say that nothing would ever top the first couple of weeks of getting started. A lot of it was the transition from playing house to running house.

Me and my co-founder, we would met up at a diners at college. It was during breaks while we were still in school. We would come up with fake business plans and fake product documents. It was this sort of make-believe and fun-pretend exercise. Its funny that after all the research of seeing who does what and how, you end up throwing everything and doing it your own way.

Rohan: What are little things you do in your week to stay productive?
Daniel: I am a big list maker. It’s always big things to small things and medium things featuring there. Every week is a list of small things on a bullet list that need to be accomplished to make next week better than this week! I usually have 20-30 items on the list. I try to identify the top 2-3 that just has to be done. Every time I start a new project I start with Evernote or a notebook.

People always come up with challenges but the details it takes to address them can get fuzzy. I like to keep things in a very execution driven thing. I never do anything unless it’s on my bullet list and all the steps needed are listed down there. I find it very helpful!

Rohan: What is your message to those who are watching this/reading this?
Daniel: You are never too good for any opportunity. That was very helpful to get my foot in the door for various things.

You really need a lot of advice for how to do things. People do put a lot of ideas around how valuable your time is and how you should do something. Never let that cloud your judgement for taking up opportunities! Anything that comes up that could lead you to something new, you should go for it.

When you are starting something new you will always have something else as your competition. They can be better in every way. But you can be more prolific and you can try harder. It’s really easy to drag your feet when there is so much advice out there.

In this ecosystem its very interesting that everyone has done some version of what you are trying to do. In the technology, entrepreneur or marketing side, someone likely has more experience. Whatever decision you do make, make a push on it. Do not give up on it!
—
Thank you Daniel for that! We heard some really interesting ideas about technology in the future. And hey we love lists too!

Dhanya, EB and yours truly..

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