Month: September 2016

HWMYL

All decisions implicitly ask us one big question – HWMYL? Or How will you measure your life?

I think of HYMYL as that is the short form for Clay Christensen’s excellent book with the same name. The interesting thing about this question is that it is a feature of every decision. It is just less obvious with the small decisions.

For example, deciding how you will spend the next hour or next day doesn’t scream a big life question. But, how we spend our time is and should be a by product of our priorities. What clothes to buy, where to go for a dinner, and what gifts we purchase are all manifestations of our answers to this big question.

When we move to bigger decisions – do we take that big job, do we get married now, do we move to a different place – the decision is just a manifestation of what matters most to us.

2 things make these decisions easier –

1. Have an answer to the HWMYL question. Take a stab at what you think matters to you. A simple approach is to take a trip to the future to your funeral. What are the people saying about you? What would you like them to say? There are more elaborate approaches, too. Just boil it down into a couple of words in prioritized order. I think of mine as “people, learning, and impact” – if it is helpful.

2. Expect to learn more about what matters to you as you make these decisions. Even if you’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how you will measure your life, you will often learn a ton from how you make these big decisions. You may find out that some things matters to you a lot more than you thought. That’s important too.

The beauty about the HWMYL question is that the answers may change with time – and that’s okay. As we grow in wisdom, what matters to us might change.

But, the beauty of the question is the fact that it is a question. That is, the answer matters far less than simply asking the question.

Elevate

Masterchef is a cooking competition. But, Gordon Ramsay’s presence, energy and artistry elevates it to be more than that. It inspires the contestants to elevate their performance. And, it entertains and inspires viewers all over the world as they watch these home cooks transform into artistic chefs.

The Pike place fish market is one of Seattle’s popular tourist spots. It is a fish market which has huge difficulty dealing with the volume of applications of people who want to be part of its staff. A fish market with a different sort of recruitment problem! Growing up in India, we were taught to associate fish markets with chaos, dirt and smell. When John Yokohama (reluctantly) took over ownership in 1965, it was still just a fish market with most of those associations. He decided he would elevate it into something much more than that. And he did.

Soccer or, football outside the US, is just a game played by a bunch of people kicking a ball around. It is unlikely that the folks who first created a game out of kicking a ball around would have imagined the sort of following soccer inspires. Thanks to the artistry of generations of players and a legion of smart entrepreneurs, the game became much more than a game.

All three of these are mass market examples. Most people have heard of soccer. Many have heard of Masterchef. Fewer have heard of Pike place fish market. There are many examples of people and organizations in our communities that have taken something seemingly commonplace and made it much more than that.

Every time I come across one of these examples, I am reminded of the fact that things are never what they seem to us on first glance. They can always be a lot more than that. We just have to learn to look at things and people with an eye for their potential. When we find something that looks devoid of inspiration, we can choose to elevate it. It doesn’t come easy. It often requires us to swim upstream. But, choosing to do so consistently not only changes us for the better, but it also transforms those who engage with it.

This isn’t about doing the big things. This is about doing the small things with extraordinary love.

Small moments

There are so many magical small moments in a day.

Waking up in the middle of the night and realizing you’ve still got a couple of hours of sleep left.

Snoozing that alarm once to get a precious few extra minutes of sleep.

Managing to squeeze that little bit of toothbrush from the tube.

Seeing more green traffic lights than red ones on the way to work.

Walking out of a good meeting.

Making a colleague smile.

Smelling great food.

Feeling alive as you enjoy sweating on a run outdoors.

Reading a passage from a book that strikes a cord.

Enjoying a breath of fresh air as you take a walk.

Telling someone you love that you love them.

Being there for someone who needs you.

We love the big moments. The award ceremony, the big promotion, the raise, the graduation, and the signing of the paperwork.

But, the big moments are so few and far between that life can feel like an endless pursuit, an endless treadmill. It is when we learn to appreciate the small moments that we learn to appreciate the pursuit, that we realize that the pursuit is all there is.

As we live and appreciate these small moments, we live our days. And, as we live our days, so we live our lives.

To daily heroes

We saw “The Piano Guys” live in a small and beautiful concert a few weeks back. Regulars here know how much I love their music. It turns out that their personalities are as wonderful as their music and it came through as they spoke to us between songs. I took away two powerful messages from my time with them. I thought I’d share the first today – an ode to daily heroes.

Steven Sharp Nelson, the talented Cellist, took to the mic to dedicate this song to the daily heroes. We all know who these heroes are.

The moms and dads who give everything to make sure their children are learning.

The partner who’s got your back.

The teachers who never give up.

The manager who simply cares a tremendous amount for her team.

The friend who you know you can rely on.

The guy at the restaurant who always shows up with a smile.

The janitor who does her job incredibly well, every day.

And to every one else who made a difference to your life.

The Piano Guys dedicated their rendition of “The Fight Song” to these daily heroes. After they did, we heard someone at the back talk about how Rachel Platten, the person who sung the song, spoke about it at the very same venue. She had been struggling for years as a waitress when she wrote that song as a message to herself to keep giving it her all. Fitting.

[embedyt] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOO5qRjVFLw%5B/embedyt%5D

Thank you to all my daily heroes. It is you who make life the blessing it is.

PS: I listen to this just as I get into work on most days. The Cello at 1:23 is stunning. Thank you, Piano Guys.

PPS: Thanks to one of you, I just realized that my email feed has been down over the last couple of days. My apologies to the email subscribers. Hopefully the bug has been fixed.

Amazon experience

We went down to a physical retail store to buy stuff for the home the other day. Right then, I realized how much we missed the Amazon experience. We missed two aspects in particular.

1. Reviews. I felt lost as I looked at products in the aisle. Were these the ones that came highly recommended? On what basis were they on the aisle?

2. Unlimited selection. We were looking for a specific product we’d seen online. But, it was “out of stock.” Out of stock? What is that? :-)

Three reflections –

First, reviews and unlimited selection make the Amazon experience vastly much superior to most physical retail stores. I could immediately see a future application for augmented reality. I would imagine us wearing AR glasses to see reviews superposed on top off products in physical retail stores. We’d be able to instantly compare attributes and prices across retailers as well. Pushing this further, I’d imagine retailers would already know what I intend to buy by having their staff wear AR glasses of their own. After all, I was probably logged into their website when I was searching. They’d be able to help me as soon as they saw me walk in.

Second, hybrid approaches often tend to be powerful. Maybe retailers could do better with having computers onsite that would help us browse their online inventory. At least, they could convert our intent to a sale by helping us make a purchase and have it delivered to our homes rather than have us go back and order it on Amazon. On the other hand, Amazon retail stores would be very helpful. They could just have all their best selling merchandise in one place.

Finally, it is impossible to roll technology back. Such experiences repeatedly underline how naive discussions around bringing jobs back to “x country” are. The Amazon experience is better for customers with far lesser people employed per dollar of revenue. Even the folks who are employed in their warehouses are slowly being replaced by robots with a few human supervisors. Technology innovation is going to keep moving forward.

It is up to us to keep pace with it.

Time pressure

I spent the last twenty minutes searching for inspiration to write something worth sharing today. I went through a list of ideas and links on my OneNote, started and stopped two drafts, and thought about a few lessons from the past few days. Still, nothing. Today is the day off for Labor Day (venture capitalist Albert Wenger has a thoughtful post up on the subject – thanks as always, Albert). It occurred to me that I would have finished writing the post by now if this was any other weekday. The difference is the absence of time pressure. I know I have longer than the usual twenty minutes.

I have come to realize that you don’t just learn important life lessons. No, the important ones are re-learned again and again and again. You may learn once that gratitude greatly contributes to happiness. But, it isn’t a one and done thing. To make it a part of who you are, you commit to re-learning it regularly. And, once it is a part of how you operate, you just re-learn its importance every single day. In some ways, a good life is just a collection of integrative principles that you learn and re-learn and then re-learn again.

The power of time pressure is one of those ideas. We all know constraints build creativity. I certainly have written about that at least once every year in the past 8 years or so. But, it still isn’t a part of how I operate. Yes, I remember it every once a while. But, I can think of at least three times in the past two weeks when I’ve wished for no constraints. Wouldn’t it be better if there was no time pressure to finish this? Wouldn’t it be better to not have financial constraints?

No, it wouldn’t be. The tension of time pressure is a beautiful tension that pushes us to be efficient and creative. I always remember my time at a client project a few years ago when the shuttle to the train station left at 530pm. As it was a long commute back to the city, most folks left then. And, the afternoons were always very productive because you knew you couldn’t stay in the office any longer. I still imitate a “get out at 530pm” schedule to this day thanks to that experience. I thought I’d learnt it. But, not really. I still don’t appreciate constraints as much as I should.

Maybe a first step would be to stop whining about time pressure. Writing here under time pressure on most days ought to be a daily reminder of that idea. So, here’s to more appreciation of constraints..

And, of course, here’s to time pressure.

Achievement vs. potential – The 200 words project

Researchers tested two different Facebook ads for the same comedian. Half the ads said the comedian, Kevin Shea, “Could be the next big thing.” The other half said, “He is the next big thing.” The first ad generated far more click-throughs and likes than the second.”
Studies around candidates applying for new jobs showed that applicants had better chances emphasizing potential.

People often find potential more interesting than accomplishment because it’s more uncertain, the researchers argued. That uncertainty can lead people to think more deeply about the person they’re evaluating. The more intensive processing that is required can lead to rationalizing by generating more and better reasons as to why the person is a good choice.

The implication? When selling our skills, we should consider emphasizing our potential as much or more than our past achievements. Potential is interesting.

The potential to be good at something can be preferred over actually being good at that very same thing. – Dan Pink, To Sell is Human

—
Source and thanks to: To Sell is Human by Dan Pink, Original study by Michael Norton (HBS), Zakary Tormala (Stanford), Jayson Jia (Stanford)

(The 200 words project involves sharing a story from a book/blog/article I’ve read within 200 words)

Roads not taken

Our ability to reflect and see ourselves from an outside point of view is a big part of what makes us human. A side-effect of that ability is to dwell on roads not taken. We could spend days wondering about “what if I had..”

I’ve noticed two patterns whenever I think of roads not taken. First, I only consider the best outcomes from that road I didn’t take. If I’m thinking about an opportunity, I focus on the best case situation if I’d taken the opportunity and ignore any negative scenarios. Second, I neglect all the thought I’d put into making the decision.

Hindsight is always 20:20, of course. There is definitely a lot to be learnt from observing our past behavior. But, we must only move to correct something if we see a distinct pattern. For example, if we find ourselves repeatedly over-weighting risk in our decisions, there’s good reason to be mindful of that the next time we find ourselves making an important decision.

Beyond that, fantasizing about roads not taken is a pointless exercise. We must learn to build a solid decision making process and then trust that process. To do otherwise is just to invite unhappiness. Besides, it is worth remembering that our current state is a result of the best decisions we could have taken given what we knew. So, in theory, we did our best with the cards we were dealt. That’s all we can do.

We just have to keep the faith that we’ll push ourselves to learn from what is happening to us and, over time, to know better. And, when we know better, we will do better.

Downstream effects

Better decisions can be made by taking a moment to think about downstream effects.

When Wal-Mart cut costs by removing store employees, they just ended transferring the massive burden of stopping shop-lifting to the local police.

In an attempt to improve their demographic balance, Russia tried paying women money to have kids. But, they found an increase in abandonment rates. After collecting their pay outs, women were dropping these kids in orphanages. Sweden’s answer to helping improve demographics was to have an incredible range of maternity benefits. A Swedish woman can take 16 months of maternity leave (13 of them paid at 80%) until her child is 8 years old. If she has 3 children, that’s 4 years of leave. Sadly, women in their twenties are among the largest unemployed groups in Sweden.

On the flip side, Google outsourcing TensorFlow, an open source machine learning library, helped a Japanese farmer and former engineer create a system for sorting cucumbers.

And, the African Great Green Wall initiative is likely to have long term ripple effects beyond just preventing the Sahara desert from increasing in size. When 21 countries come together to plant trees, there’s plenty Africa and the world gains from the effort.

downstream effects, externalities, unintended consequencesThanks to The Economist for the image

Every one of these stories is a story about the downstream effects of decisions. In Economics, these are called externalities or unintended consequences. Every decision we make has unintended consequences. In some cases, the negative downstream effects can be so powerful that they can just override any positives from the first order consequences of the decisions.

As a result, we must discipline ourselves to push all decision making conversation into the realm of downstream effects. All company destroying decisions started out as good ideas in the short term… with bad downstream effects.

Nobel Prize winners

Nobel prize winners have been getting older and more specialized in the past century. With more knowledge being created, the time it takes to get to the cutting edge of a field is increasing. The definition of a field is getting narrower, too. So, a future Nobel prize winner will have to spend a much longer period of time to first understand everything that has happened before and then innovate.

There are implications for us, too. Over this century, our world has seen a tremendous increase in knowledge too. While we can probably do well at our current jobs by investing just in functional expertise, having an understanding of the big picture will get harder and harder. It will require us to invest in learning in a way that makes us look more like Nobel Prize winners.

We’re approaching an interesting crossroads as we transition from an era of industrialization to an era of connection. The previous transition between eras was very bloody and only settled after multiple wars. This era is seeing signs of unrest, too. The wave of populism we’re seeing around the world isn’t going away any time soon. It doesn’t just affect our politics. It affects our lives. And, if we intend to contribute to the solution, understanding what is driving these reactions and understanding why the things we take granted in our societies are the way they are will be an important first step.

That’s at least how I’m approaching all this noise. I’m working my way through a reading list that involves spending time in the past and the future in equal measure – The Inevitable (on technology), The Seventh Sense (on networks), Bad Samaritans (on free trade), The Accidental Superpower (on geopolitics), and The World After Capital (on a thesis about the next era).

We must first understand why things are as they are. Only then can we ask why not.