May 2013 – Page 3 – A Learning a Day

Increasing Mindfulness

I blogged about attention a year ago. This paragraph from Eric Weiner’s great book sums it up well..

“Attention’ is an underrated word. It doesn’t get the… well, the attention it deserves. We pay homage to love, and happiness, and, God knows, productivity, but rarely do we have anything good to say about attention. We’re too busy, I suspect. Yet our lives are empty and meaningless without attention.

My two-year-old daughter fusses at my feet as I type these words. What does she want? My love? Yes, in a way, but what she really wants is my attention. Pure, undiluted attention. Children are expert at recognizing counterfeit attention. Perhaps love and attention are really the same thing. One can’t exist without the other.”

I’ve always struggled with attention. I tend to be attention deficit by nature and smartphones, social media, and notifications haven’t exactly made it easy (excuses.. yes, I know).

13 months down the line, I don’t think I’m too much better at this. I still struggle with attention.. but I’m hoping to improve by focusing on mindfulness first. Mindfulness is just the ability to “be” in the moment. The essence of zen, as described by a teacher, is the ability to focus on one thing at a time. That requires radical self awareness and mindfulness or conscious action is the first step.

Over the past few months, I’ve been slowly changing habits that increase distraction and thus reduce mindfulness. For example..

– On my phone. All sorts of push notifications are switched off. I switched off email notifications more than a year ago and it’s now moved to applications like whatsapp. This helps a lot.. because I now only get messages when I want to see them or when I want to engage.

– On my computer. I switched off Outlook’s new email alert more than a year ago. That helps a lot. Additionally, I’ve switched off from all sorts of messengers and communicators except when I really need to use them.

– On social media. 5 weeks ago, I decided to experiment with never checking my Facebook news feed. The experiment has worked well and I only get on Facebook to share blog posts, quotes, and the like. It’s one way and I’m loving that.

– On email. I’d tested a project to only check my personal email and social media in 3 hour intervals. That’s been fantastic and has been working for a few months now.

– On meditation. Thanks Headspace – nothing like a daily morning reminder to be more mindful.

I’ve paid lip service to mindfulness and attention for too long. I’m hopeful I will report some improvement in a year from now.

Happy mindful weekend!

Reflections from Dick Costolo’s commencement address

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I watched Richard/Dick Costolo’s commencement address at the University of Michigan earlier this week. Dick C is the CEO of Twitter and previously was a co-founder at Feedburner. I’ve been interested in hearing from him ever since I learnt that he’s an ex-Improv artist and stand up comedian (I love such diversity!).

Here are my reflections from the talk –

– Learnings from Improv. Inspired by Dan Pink’s points in “To Sell is Human,” I recently bought a book on Improv. Improv principles like listen for offers, see humor in every situation, make the other person look good, be open, and make a plan but adjust rapidly resonate with me and Dick Costolo’s learnings from improv struck a chord.

– “Life is unscripted.” We have to be relentless about making scripts and understand the direction while being relentless about adapting. Make plans but be open for change is a worthy principle.

– “Our stage can be absolutely anything.” His Director once pointed out that they weren’t thinking big enough. The stage they were on could be absolutely anything – a space shuttle or an Amazonian forest if they wanted it to be.
It’s something we need to keep reminding ourselves. We are the heroes of our own stories and we own the script.

– Twitter went down when Russian President Medvedev entered the office to send a tweet. I’ve often wondered why the biggest IT issues on my computer/internet/Skype happen just when I’m about to record a Real Leader interview. Dick C’s experience with Twitter going down as the Russian President entered made me smile. As a quote I read today goes – “Expect problems. Eat them for breakfast.”

I enjoyed the talk. It’s not often you have a CEO of a top companies channelling inspiration from improv and stand-up. Good on you, Dick C.

The ALearningaDay Scholarship Challenge

Regulars here know of my interest in all things related to leading a happy and meaningful life. Research has repeatedly pointed to 3 things that help –

1. Excellent Habits – e.g. exercise, reading great books, deliberate practice to improve skills
2. High willpower – to develop great habits
3. Self awareness and reflection – to keep perspective, stay upbeat, and keep learning from our experiences

Applying these principles in my life has meant an often-painful but always-rewarding set of experiences over the past 3 years. You are never “done” on this journey as the success lies in enjoying the journey but you do get better at it the more you try. The hardest challenge amongst the 3 has been embedding good habits into my life. I am still a long way from where I’d like to be – the exercise habit, for example, is one I’m working hard on.

I am, as a result, very interested to see if an intense 6 week burst that involves sticking to these habits for an external reward does result in sustainable long term change.

Hence, the ALearningaDay scholarship challenge. The ALearningaDay scholarships are 2 scholarships worth SGD 600 (around USD 485) for students applying to the RealAcad entrepreneurial leadership program in 2013. I attended my first RealAcad camp at Stanford university as a young university student and learnt a great deal. I’ve been fortunate to go to a few more camps following my first and continue to work with RealAcad as an alumni contributor.

The scholarship challenge will work as follows –

Round 1 – Paragraph

1. All interested 2013 applicants will register by submitting their name, email address, and a paragraph explaining why they feel they deserve the ALearningaDay scholarship (in less than 150 words).
Registration deadline is 11:59pm GMT on Friday, 17 May 2013

2. A panel of anonymous judges will pick 3-5 students for round 2 and the successful students will be notified by email on Sunday, 19 May 2013

Round 2 – 6 week challenge

1. For 6 straight weeks, the participants in the challenge will have to do the following every weekday (Monday-Friday) starting Monday, 20 May 2013 –

a) Post a book byte on The BookBytes Project from one of the 4 recommended books.
(So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey, Willpower by Roy Baumeister, The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg)

b) Keep an exercise log and exercise for a minimum of 20 minutes 4 out of 5 weekdays.

c) Create a learning blog/use an existing blog and share one learning from the day.

d) Compile the book byte, learning, and a simple 0/1 exercise score on a google spreadsheet tab to make it easy for the final judging.

2. The challenge will end on Friday, 21 June 2013. The anonymous judge panel will shortlist the final 2 winners and announce the winner on or before Monday, 1 Jul 2013.

FAQs/Questions/Other Notes

· The assumption with the book byte is that you’d have to do a substantive amount of daily reading.
· The applicants will be judged on the quality of the content they put up and their ability to keep up these habits.
· The submissions will be treated with 100% trust. We will make sure the participants are reminded of the dangers of marginal thinking.

The going-in assumption is that this exercise will be beneficial to participants whether or not they win the cash amount. In fact, I am sure that the resulting habits would be FAR more valuable in the long run the scholarship amount.

It will also be a very painful process if my attempts at embedding these habits into my life are anything to go by. But, nothing is good accomplished without pain. It will be a real challenge.. And I’m looking forward to seeing how many decide to take the challenge head on.

If you are one of those applicants who’s ready for the challenge, please click here to register. If you haven’t applied to RealAcad’s 2013 programs and want to participate in the challenge, you have 1 week to get it all done. ;-)

And, to the rest of the community, updates on this experiment on living well will follow! :-)

Thank you Sir Alexander Chapman Ferguson

As humans, we only understand the value or magnitude of things when they are put into context. A fact like “Michael Phelps has won 22 gold medals” would mean nothing until it is put into perspective. However, when we realize that Michael Phelps alone won more gold medals in each Olympics he participated than 80% of countries and that he has won more medals in 3 Olympics than many countries ever will, we realize that Michael Phelps is a colossus who might never be surpassed.

Sir Alex Ferguson retired after 26 years at the helm of Manchester United yesterday with 13 English Premier League titles, 2 European Cups, 5 FA Cups, and a whole host of other silverware. He has won more Premier League trophies than all English football clubs except Manchester United and Liverpool. As a fan of the club and the man, my only wish was that he had waited for another European Cup before retiring because he would have put the debate around “Who is the greatest football manager of them all?” to rest forever. Now, there still is room for a bit of debate. But, debate or not, we will likely never see the likes of Sir Alex Ferguson again and the world of football will be lesser for it.

There is fervent debate about who would be the next Manchester United manager. The article that describes the difficulty of the job best is here (please excuse the occasional profanity)

Manchester United have had an aura about them for the past 20 years. As John Nicholson in the article observes, “United were always a huge club with huge support going back to the war. Ferguson didn’t make them huge, his achievement was to deliver a level of success commensurate with their status in football.” In his time as Manchester United manager, he has seen more than a 1000 managers come and go. This stability has undoubtedly been a source of the extraordinary success.

A lot hangs on the next managerial appointment. It remains to be seen whether Manchester United will remain a footballing behemoth or whether it will descend to being another football club with supporters’ ceaseless talk about the “glory years.”

Whatever happens, I guess all that matters is that Sir Alex Ferguson will not be in the famous dugout next season. It’s hard to explain the emotions that accompany that… so I will choose to just finish what he might say.. “Bloody hell.”

Cam Graham, Management Consultant and Executive Coach, on removing assumptions, developing leadership, and managing change

I met Cam on my first consulting project. The project was a massive post merger integration in the Middle East and Cam was leading the program. I knew I’d learn lots from Cam the moment I met with him. While we only managed to make time for 2 meals (i.e. 2 one-on-one conversations!), we went on to stay in close touch. I owe Cam a big thank you for many learnings over the years – the biggest of which was undertaking a journey to understand myself better and be comfortable with myself.

Cam has influenced many a point of view over these years and I’ve learnt a lot from his questions. (He’s also been the “wiser friend” on more blog posts than I can count!) I enjoyed this interview as it gave me an opportunity to ask him questions!

Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Full transcript as usual on Realleaders.tv.

My favorite parts –

“The one that I run into and have to remind myself of most often is to not assume. Don’t jump to conclusions; don’t be too quick to judge. Just pause. Always give the other person the benefit of the doubt. It’s about human interaction. There’s no need to usually rush as much as most of us do. That one I run into every day and have to remind myself of a hundred times a day.”

“I also believe that no matter how many times I’ve been told in my life that we’re all different, and we need to respect our differences, that we are more similar than we sometimes are willing to accept. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t respect the differences, but sometimes we get obsessed with them. Eighty percent of us are essentially the same. We’re the same people with the same motives, the same drives, and the same needs regardless of our religion, our ethnicity, or our profession. That’s been a good guide for me as I’ve ventured into many different types of organizations to see if I can help.”

“It’s often not about overcoming weaknesses. We spend so much time, especially in western culture, trying to fix what’s broken with us. I think we have to manage those things. We have to make sure we’re mitigating risks or severe damage but more and more know who we really are and what our strengths are and let those flourish. “

Enjoy!

Romance is hard work

When a friend first pitches the idea of going on ‘nature walks’ on weekends, “oohs” and “aahs” follow. Everyone is interested. Everyone wants to do it. “Such a romantic idea,” “an opportunity to smell the roses” are the sorts of comments that follow.

Then he follows up with next steps/the reality. Wake up at 6am on a Saturday morning and then walk for 4 hours. Suddenly, everyone has an excuse. The romance seems to wear out pretty darn quick.

Everyone stumbles onto the truth – it’s all romance only in theory. In reality, romance is hard work and we have to explicitly choose to do it. Why take that detour to buy flowers for your wife/girlfriend when you can just show up? Why spend all those months learning the piano when you can laze around watch TV? Why go out of the way to treat a customer/client extra special when you can lean back on the default option?

The beauty of this is that once you put in the hard work, the results are..well..romantic.

Try asking the lady who unexpectedly received flowers..

Good News? Bad news? Who knows?

You’ve probably heard of this famous parable..

A farmer’s only horse ran away. The neighbors, trying to console him, said, “What terrible news about your horse. What will you do?” But the farmer said, “Bad news, good news… who knows?”

A few days later, the horse returned, leading an entire herd of wild horses. The neighbors exclaimed, “How wonderful!” The farmer replied, “Good news, bad news… who knows?”

The next day, the farmer’s son tried to ride one of the new horses. The horse threw the son, who broke both legs. The neighbors said, “What a misfortune! Your son won’t be able to work on the farm.” The farmer stood still and said, “Bad news, good news… who knows?”

Within the week, news of a war had broken out. Soldiers arrived in the village, taking new recruits. All the young men were drafted to fight, except for the farmer’s son.

Good news? Bad news? Who knows?

I received some sage advice as I was deliberating on a decision the other day.

“Is what you are going to do going to be right?” I was asked. “Probably not. Is it going to be bad? We don’t know. Is what you’ve done so far good or bad? We don’t know. It just is.”

“Just keep learning, keep forming opinions, keep testing them out. We have an urge to label things as good or bad. A things isn’t generally good or bad – it just is. We choose what we do about it.”

Sage advice, I thought.

On Atoms to Bits and Reversible Business Models

This week’s book learning is part 2 of a 2 part series comprising of 4 of my favorite insights from ‘Free’ by Chris Anderson. (Part 1)

Atoms to Bits:

– Encyclopaedia disruption. The encyclopedia business used to be worth more than a billion dollars with Britannica in the lead. Encarta from Microsoft (CD based) first disrupted it before Wikipedia turned the market upside down.

“Free” often turns billion dollar markets into million dollar markets. Of course, while theoretically billions of dollars is lost in terms of market cap thanks to this disruption, the money moves elsewhere/results in other kinds of gain that can’t be measured e.g. productivity gains in case of Wikipedia.

– One winner. The one other distinguishing feature is that while market share may be split in a non-free market between the top 3 companies, in free markets, the top company holds the key to the money with 90%+ share of the market. (e.g. Google in search advertising)

Insight: The moment an industry moves from transmitting atoms (e.g. boxes of encyclopaedia) to bits – free becomes inevitable. So, what can we do about free? Re-think business models……

Reversible business models:

– Denmark gym example. A gym in Denmark offers a membership program where you pay nothing if you show up once every week. If you miss a week, you pay full price for the month.

The psychology is brilliant – if you go every week, you feel great. If you get busy and miss a week (very high likelihood), you’ll blame yourself instead of blaming the business for charging you, as is normal. The instinct is not to cancel membership but to double your resolve.

Such ‘reversible business models’ are being tested all over –

Example 1: Music clubs in Los Angeles began charging bands to play in the club. They realized that bands value exposure more than cash.

Example 2: In China, some doctors are paid monthly when their patients are healthy. If they are sick, it’s the doctor’s fault.

Sketch by EB

I hope you enjoyed the short series on “Free.” For the next couple of weeks, we will be diving into the world of personal finance..

10 seconds longer

Let everything you do today take 10 seconds longer – 10 seconds to just revel in the moment.

Look outside the window 10 seconds longer. Lounge around 10 seconds longer. Walk slower, eat slower, and talk slower.

Let’s face it – “smelling the roses” isn’t easy to do every day. Life takes over, we get busy, and time flies.

But, today can be different.

Let today be the day we smell the roses. No need to accomplish anything and no need to solve the world’s problems.

No, today we pause, enjoy the moment, and have a nice day.

All of the serious stuff can be scheduled for tomorrow.

Today, we smell the roses.

To get started, listen to a groovy tune, get a solo dance party started, and enjoy being alive and well..

3 questions to ask before an important interview/task

Assuming you have put in enough effort, here are 3 questions that will help –

1. Can I do it?
Recent research has revealed that pumping ourselves up doesn’t help. What helps is interrogative self talk, i.e., calmly asking ourselves this question and reminding ourselves of the preparation we have put in.

2. Why do I say I can do it?
Revisit your preparation.

3. What will help now?
Brush up a couple of concepts if necessary. Else, listen to music and relax.

And then it’s show time!

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