Month: July 2014

The law of painful progress

I had a realization when I was learning how to play the guitar – if my practice sessions didn’t have me wincing in pain, I wasn’t making enough progress.

This realization served me well in the 8 months I took lessons as I made faster progress than I had initially expected. The results were evident too – weeks when my practice sessions were more painful always yielded more progress.

The law applies to every skill, of course. The more we feel the pain, the more we’re likely making progress. There is no painless progress.

25 things I’ve learnt from 4 years of work

As I transition to being a student again, I thought I’d write down 25 things I’ve learnt. It started as a list of 7 but, somehow, there seemed to be many more that were just as important. Brevity is clearly not a strength as yet.

1. You are better off focusing on your “learn-rate” and skills than rewards that look good. Your learn-rate is the intensity with which you learn – focus hard on it. Seek learnings from all sources – teammates, bosses, peers, subordinates, books, movies – just be a learning machine and forget about rewards. In fact, be actively wary of jobs that give you too much of what’s considered good too early.

2. Being so good you can’t be ignored is one part. It isn’t enough – Learning to market your work is just as important.

3. The train you are on matters a lot more than how smart you are. Luck matters. I had a unique opportunity in the last 2 years that enabled me to work across 5 countries in 3 continents. Sure, I didn’t mess the first one up but I’d be a fool if I attributed it to my skill. Being at the right place at the right time helps a lot. And, being skilled, positive and open increases your odds of doing that. Allow luck to find you. But, don’t rely on it.

4. You don’t get what you deserve. You get what you ask for and what you negotiate. A PS here – you get the best possible results when you find others to champion your cause and negotiate on your behalf.

5. Build a great board of directors and do it deliberately. You are the CEO of Me, Inc. Execute well and seek counsel over long term strategy. A big part of learning is learning from the experience of those wiser than you and spending time with a great Board can vastly improve your learn-rate.

6. Last minute work will kill you in the long run. Avoid at all costs.

7. A well scoped project has no need for long hours of work and definitely no need for weekends. Your best 0 error work is done when you are working comfortably with 100% focus. Remember – we only have 3-5 super productive hours in a day. Focus on getting the most out of them – the rest is gravy.

8. Get your shit together. Be organized and responsive. That doesn’t mean checking email at 2 in the morning. It means banishing procrastination, being orderly and being responsible. It is a way of doing things.

9. Things have a way of working themselves out if you put in the work. The law of unattraction works here. Stay calm and let the universe do its work. (This is bloody hard)

10. Drive your own review and feedback process. Work hard on not allowing weaknesses to get in the way by actively working on them, one at a time (e.g. a weakness every 6 months/year). Pay a lot of attention to your strengths. Your weaknesses are a way of reducing unforced errors and your strengths are how you hit your winners. When you are a beginner, avoiding unforced errors matters most. But, as you get better, your winners count for more.

11. You can only push so much. After a point, it becomes counter productive.

12. Take some time to understand human nature. Working with and moving people is where great change is made. You may not like all you see but you can definitely learn to understand and accept it. Understanding what drives people is always useful.

13. Understanding people is only possible if you take the time to understand yourself. Self awareness is a learned trait and it boosts our ability to deal with that other large beast – insecurity.

14. Work on a project outside work. At the very least, have a hobby that you care about. Use your weekends well. Good weekends drive good weeks. That said, don’t take this to an extreme. Let your hair loose and do an all nighter that messes with your sleep patterns often.

15. Actively build and maintain a support system of people not connected to work. I call this group framily – or close friends and family. Keep them engaged in your life by working on small projects with them, e.g. by volunteering together.

16. Sleep 8 hours, eat breakfast, and exercise nearly everyday. A healthy mind lives in a healthy body.

17. Book at least 1 good vacation and 1 great vacation during the year. It does wonders to your productivity.

18. Read. A lot. This is the single biggest driver of your learn-rate. If  you’re wondering how to make time, here are 3 ideas. 1. Cut down your TV time 2. Try audio books while at the gym 3. Use every minute of your commute

19. Mistakes are an inevitability. Don’t worry about the mistake – worry about the process that led to the mistake and focus on a creative, constructive and corrective response. I repeat that every time I make a mistake – focus on a creative, constructive and corrective response.

20. Every experience is what you make of it.

21. Your reputation is everything. Guard it carefully. If you don’t create and manage what you are known for (i.e. your brand), someone else will.

22. Try to never be guilty of a bad attitude. This is hard, especially if you are stuck in frustrating circumstances, but important.

23. Manage people the way you’d like to be managed and not on how some bad manager managed you. Don’t be a jerk.

24. Make the effort to understand the politics. Politics is inevitable if there are more than 3 people in a room. Avoid politicking if you can, however. Keep the game as clean and as meritocratic as possible. (A general rule when it comes to politics – if you’re unable to identify the sucker at the table, it is probably you.)

25. What got you here won’t get you there. This is the simplest and most important principle. If you’ve been doing well so far, the bar will soon be raised and you will have to use your accumulated knowledge and wisdom to figure out the next curve and reinvent yourself. Drive the change actively… what got you here won’t get you there.

When will the excuses stop?

My mom pointed out this morning that a couple of my blog posts last week had a bunch of grammatical errors. My initial reaction during that split second was to get defensive and offer an excuse. It had touched an insecurity around my ability to write. And, I reasoned to myself, it had after all been a brutal last couple of weeks and, on some days, just hitting publish on a post felt like a victory.

That’s when a question crossed my mind –  when will the excuses stop?

Sure, the next couple of weeks may not be brutal. But, what about the next tough period? Will I make excuses then, too? ‘

The English football team offers a shining example of this problem. After every international tournament failure, the media points to one excuse after another. And, it typically ends with everyone blaming the English Premier League for not having enough homegrown players.

If the problem was that, how do you explain Costa Rica knocking out big wigs like Italy and England en-route to the quarter finals? How you explain a team like Algeria narrowly losing to the Germans in the Round of 16? Both these teams didn’t make it there by accident. They were simply teams that were good at playing together as a team. They got good while the others didn’t.

England’s failure was not a surprise to me. Germany’s success was not a surprise either (the extent of the thrashing they doled out to Brazil definitely was). The former makes a habit of making excuses while the latter simply focuses on clinical execution by a collection of excellent football players.

It is impossible to get better by making excuses. I ended up engaging my mom to help fix the grammatical errors. While I am glad I did, I also know that I was awfully close to making an excuse.

We always have a choice – to make an excuse or simply get better. And, I find it heartening that it is entirely my choice.

The 3 steps to be of help

We occasionally find ourselves at professional or personal events where we’re amidst a bustle of activity. We know we could be of help but we’re not exactly sure how. if you ever find yourself waiting around wondering how you can be of help, I’ve found these 3 steps to be really  useful.

1. You have to want to help. It begins here. Ask yourself if you really want to be of help. If the answer is yes, you will generally find a way to be useful. Often, a happy, positive, and energetic presence is help in itself.

2.  Start with the simple stuff. If you’re still finding your feet in a new environment, start with the simple stuff like getting folks food and water. Soldiers are only given guns once they learn how to march. Asking how you can help never hurts.

3. Stay calm. Events tend to be busy and full of last minute problems – the decorations don’t show up or the audio system doesn’t work. Stay calm. Staying calm is a learned skill and is one you can teach yourself. While others run around like headless chickens, you can always be the one thinking carefully about what needs to be done and ensure your effort is productive.

None of these 3 steps is rocket science. I guess that is exactly the point. Don’t wander around wondering if you can be of help (and this applies beyond events). There’s always a lot to be done – just ask productive people how you can help and help.

Losing 11-0

2 years ago, a few friends and I signed up for an amateur football league in London. We initially signed up for the 6th/bottom division and soon realized that there weren’t as many teams as required to operate 6 divisions. So, all of us were lumped onto 1 division. The next misunderstanding became apparent pretty soon – the teams who participated weren’t really “amateur.”

We lost 11-0 in our first game. I’d love to say it got better. But, it didn’t. We continued losing by huge margins and our problems only increased with time. For example, our team members soon lost interest in showing up on a freezing Saturday morning and getting thrashed (imagine that). After a particularly bad 15-0 defeat, we decided to call it quits. Our average score in the 10 or so matches we played was a 11-0 defeat.

Just yesterday, a friend (from this football team) and I exchanged emails and laughed about our 11-0 defeats. As I was thinking about it, I realized that I learnt a lot from that experience. First, it was a true test of willpower to wake up and head half way across London on a cold and rainy Saturday morning knowing fully well that a 11-0 thrashing awaited us. Second, I tried really hard to make the best of it – even resorting to send “a learning a week” emails to motivate the team after a particularly bad thrashing. It didn’t work.

And, perhaps, the attempt not working was the most important learning of all. We realized we were completely out-classed and would never be good enough. We just needed to call it quits and go home.

Sometimes, that’s as good a lesson to learn as any.

Sampson’s inability to say no – The 200 words project

Here’s this week’s 200 word idea from Give and Take by Adam Grant..

Sampson’s inability to say no. After Sampson failed in his first senate election, he competed in his second with a rival from his party who was doing equally well. So, Sampson gave up his seat and asked all his followers to vote for his rival as they had similar goals. His fellow member won – Sampson cared much more about the people than his own victory.

Sampson won many friends with his focus on giving and finally won the senate seat on his third attempt. When Sampson took office, he went against tradition to hire rivals who were all either much smarter or much better known than him. He believed he owed it to the people to have the best to govern them. One of his rivals, who had previously called him an ape, ended up describing Samson as the greatest ruler of men.

Sampson showed that it is possible to succeed as a “giver” in politics. His task was made more challenging when we take into consideration that reputation and relationships were much harder to build in the 1800s when social media didn’t exist.

And if you’ve never heard of Sampson, not to worry. Sampson was the pen name of Abraham Lincoln.

Sampson no
Source and thanks to: www.EBSketchin.com

‘Character is like a tree and reputation like a shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.’ | Abraham Lincoln

Escaping hard work

A good career takes hard work.

A good relationship takes more hard work.

A good life and happiness takes some more hard work.

Why, even a great vacation requires a lot of hard work.

True happiness and hard work come together. We can never stop working hard if we want to live good lives. We just shift the focus of our hard work from our careers to our families to our personal projects and so on. The challenges only get harder and never ever stop. But, on the upside, once we learn to work hard, we also learn to prioritize better, focus harder and bring more of ourselves to our lives.

So, we’re left with two choices – attempt to find the short cuts and escape the work or embrace the hard work totally, live well, and bring more of ourselves to the world.

We’re successful when we stop seeing the first choice and we’re happy when we embrace the second.

Solving potential problems isolated

Indian cities have many minor accidents. There’s a few hundred million trying to get to places on time and at maximum possible speed (read: 30 kilometres/hour). In a bid to reduce the number of accidents caused by excessive speeding, the city of Bangalore has a speed bump in many areas of the city every few metres. Literally. driving in Bangalore is a frustrating experience because you are stuck in a perpetual loop of increasing speed and then slowing down. This isn’t helped by the fact that, in typical Indian fashion, there is no consistency between the size of the bumps.

This strikes me as a problem born out of solving potential problems isolated. I find it hard to believe that the cost of speeding related accidents outweigh frequent traffic jams, driver frustration, damaged clutch pates, other wear and tear, and the higher petrol costs that come with the constant speeding up and slowing down required. Could we just have had stricter clamp downs on speeding and mobile phone use instead?

Solving potential problems isolated arises due to an inability to ask deeper questions. It feels like a quick win. For example, a big reason exercise related new year’s resolutions break down is because people try to desperately fit in their exercise commitment into their schedule. So, if they’re out of time during the day, they decide to sleep an hour less to keep that commitment. It feels right. It feels like a win. But it isn’t. If that happens for two days in a row, the same person will lose productivity, become increasingly unhappy, and perhaps even unhealthy. The only way to solve that problem is to thoughtfully look at our whole day’s schedule and see where we might fit in the new pretender in. What started as an exercise problem soon becomes a scheduling problem and what begins as a scheduling problem soon becomes a priority and attitude problem.

Beware quick isolated solutions to problems. If the solution hasn’t been crafted thoughtfully, it probably hasn’t been done well. As you might have figured, this process isn’t about finding that quick answer. Google can do that. It’s about asking a few good questions. No one but you can  do that..

Where will I feel most pain?

Often, that’s a great question to identify the projects worth doing.

The pain of starting afresh, the pain of fighting the resistance, the pain of having to prove ourselves again are indicators of the sort of stretching required to learn and grow. It is easiest to stay stagnant. It might also be painless in the short term but pain in the short term has it’s way of paying off in the long term.

Our lizard brain prefers to trigger the flight response at the sight of pain. Perhaps it’s time to rewire it a bit..

Organic and farm-to-table – 7 learnings about the food and agriculture industry

I have been increasingly interested in food and agriculture industry having worked with a large agribusiness client. After many debates and discussions, here is my current thesis on understanding the industry as it is today and it’s implications on our lives –

1. Crops produced in large tracts of land cannot be produced without pesticides. Thanks to the nature of infections and pests, it is impossible to crops in large tracts of land without chemicals. The only way this can be avoided is by producing crops in small greenhouses.

2. Organic crops also use chemicals – the only difference is they are more dangerous and toxic. A crop is certified as organic if it uses pesticides that are naturally available. This results in farmers buying large amounts of Copper Sulphate and Arsenic and this, in turn, results in organic crop land having large amounts of (toxic) copper and Arsenic.

3. Manure is no better than synthetic fertilizer. Is having Nitrogen Phosphate via manure better than injecting a Nitrogen Phosphate molecule? Absolutely not. A chemical is a chemical. In fact, the cost of producing manure (i.e. the cost of raising a cow) is much higher in terms of carbon footprint and environmental effects.

4. Chemicals and genetically modified (GM) food are the future. Most of the available Papayas in the world are already genetically modified. This is going to be an increasing trend. We need technological advances in seeds and food to ensure we’re able to feed 10 billion people on this planet.

5. Organic will (unfortunately) remain a premium/luxury product. Organic farming will unfortunately be a tax on limited land. However, it will remain a luxury product. One can only hope that farmers and the FDA will understand the problem of shoving large amounts of Copper Sulphate into the soil. Heroin is naturally available and that does not mean it is good.

6. Farm-to-table is the way to go. The trouble with mass produced crops is that these are often plucked/picked before they are ripe and are ripened en-route to their destination by artificial means. We are better off eating ripe food and, as a result, the farm-to-table movement is very positive. Farmers markets are going to be the key to healthy eating.

7. The rules are different when it comes to mass producing meat and poultry. My understanding of this side of the industry is limited. My understanding so far points to organic being the way to go here. This is because the industry increasingly uses heavy injection of antibiotics and hormones into cattle and poultry in their bid to maximize output. Organic and “free-range” meat and poultry seem to be the way to go.

The big learning? Treat “organic” with healthy suspicion. Understanding how the food you eat is produced. And, remember, things are increasingly not the way they seem.

That sounds tough and sobering.. it is intentionally so.