Month: April 2019

Reversing counter factuals

The easiest way to stimulate regret about situations that haven’t worked out as per plan (as yet) is to ask counter factual questions like – “What if I’d done x instead of y?”

As such questions are a guaranteed way to drive us crazy, a simple principle that I’ve found helpful is – for every such counter factual question about a situation that didn’t work out, examine a situation that did.

So, if we want to ask ourselves – “What if I’d been better at keeping my mouth shut at that meeting?” or “What if I’d bought Bitcoin in 2014?” :-) – we also ought to analyze their positive equivalents. When was a time we spoke up and made a really positive contribution? When was a time we made a good investment decision?

Applying this principle does three things at once. First, we get to learn from situations which worked in addition to situations that didn’t work. Second, we begin to appreciate the many times things have worked out well.

And, finally, we come to accept the fact that we did the best we could with what we knew. Now that we’ve learnt from it and know better, we can do better.

10 days of McDonalds

In response to a post on the challenges of research on food, James responded with an email recommending I read “The Diet Myth” by Prof Tim Spector. I’ve been working my way through this fascinating book in the past few weeks and one of the anecdotes in the book that’s stuck with me is an experiment he ran with Tom, his son, as a test subject. His son had a simple task – stick to a diet of McDonalds for 10 straight days so we can see its effects on your gut bacteria.

Through the course of the book, Prof Spector explains the key role gut bacteria plays in our health. There’s been a growing body of research on the subject too.

This post, however, isn’t about that (more on that later). This just looks at the effect the McDonalds diet on his son’s health and gut bacteria. Below are a couple of excerpts from Tom’s article in The Telegraph.

At first, my friends were quite supportive. They thought the idea was interesting and far-fetched, a mini Super Size Me diet. But by the eight or ninth day they started saying things like: “Are you sure your liver functions are intact? You look really quite jaundiced. You should really consider stopping.”

Straight after the experiment, I drove to the supermarket and got two big bags of salad. I ate them all. I was over the moon. And the test results were fascinating. I’d lost 1,400 bacterial species in my gut in just 10 days, which was extraordinary. After a week back on my normal student diet I’d recovered a bit but not completely. I still don’t know if I’ve completely restored the diversity of species to my gut.

I was the first person to look at the gut microbiome change on a McDonald’s diet, but I’m just one person. In terms of scientific reliability, that doesn’t score well. But we sent samples to three different laboratories, who tested in different ways, and my results did show really interesting trends across all three.

The experiment has definitely made me think about the bad food that I am eating. I used to work as a commis chef, so I can cook. I’m eating a lot more fruit and vegetables. 

By the end of the 10 day experiment, Tom had lost a devastating loss of microbiome diversity (1,400 less species in the gut), a loss of appetite, lethargy, and constipation.

The fascinating part to me is that all it took was 10 days..

Organization and Volume of Activity

As I’ve shared before, a useful way to generate leverage is to invest energy in activities that produce disproportionate return on investment. A reliable way to do that is to find causes and effects with exponential relationships.

One such cause and effect relationship is the effect of your level of organization when you are dealing with a high volume of activity and potential priorities.

priorities-organization

The overhead of staying very organized isn’t worth it if you don’t have much to do. But, as your “to prioritize” queue gets longer, the overhead of organization pays itself forward many times over.

The lesson: Invest in developing a system for organization that works for us. The more we have on your plate, the more we’re going to be grateful for it.

PS: For those wanting to understand this further, the Operations theory behind this is fascinating. Waiting time in a queue = mean service time x utilization x variability. So, as your resource utilization/available time decreases, any variability in activity results in big delays in your ability to get to items later in the queue. When you are organized, however, you are able to get more done in less time => your utilization decreases => the queue wait time decreases exponentially.

3 lessons on recovering from sickness

3 lessons on recovering from sickness –

1. Sickness (the cold/cough/fever kind) is the universe’s way of saying – “take a break.” Take that break.

2. The quicker we can prioritize rest, the faster our recovery will be. Conversely, the more we push it away and attempt to “soldier on,” the longer and worse the effects will be.

3. The best way to deal with sickness is to avoid it altogether. And, the way to do that is to pay attention to signals from our bodies and to take that break before we are forced to.

In sickness and in life, it always helps to do the important things before we are forced to…

The Bezos co-founder split

Hypothetical: If Sergey Brin and Larry Page were to end their co-founder partnership, would journalists describe the settlement as Page giving Brin x% of Google / Brin feeling grateful to walk away with x% of Google?

And, yet, we see such statements in the news about Mackenzie-Jeff Bezos divorce (e.g. Forbes – “Jeff Bezos To Give MacKenzie 25% Of His Amazon Stake”). Many have responded sharing stories of how Mackenzie Bezos supported Amazon in the early days. But, that’s still beside the point.

Even if she wasn’t an early employee of Amazon (she was), even if she didn’t play a key support role in the early days (she did), she is no different from a co-founder of any venture that involved Jeff Bezos.

The only plausible explanation for this sort of coverage is that the reporters who frame this as Mackenzie walking away with 25% of Amazon don’t have partners or kids. If they did, they’d know that any and all success within the family is a the result of everyone pitching in – with the partner contributing the lion’s share.

I get that we love the hero’s (often solitary) journey. Life, however, is a team sport.

Broken or imbalanced

When things go wrong, we have the choice to either see them as broken or as a result of an imbalance in our approach. For example, issues may have resulted from moving too fast/too slow/too recklessly/too thoughtfully.

If we broke something, we are left with a limited set of next steps – typically mourn it or regret it/deal with the emotions, clean up the pieces, reflect on the learning, and move on. The hardest of these is dealing with the unpleasant feelings that follows breaking something valuable.

If we believe the situation went south because of an imbalance in our approach, on the other hand, the future is rife with possibilities. Sure, there may be a few tricky situations that need resolution. But, we get to approach them with the optimism that there’s a way back – we just need to do the work to right the balance.

Every once in a rare while, we do find ourselves dealing with situations where something was broken. But, for the rest of the time, at least in my experience, we’re dealing with consequences of an imbalance.

As a result, I’ve come to realize that approaching such situations as an opportunity to re-balance is a better, more constructive, way forward than treating something as broken.

Optimism is a self fulfilling prophecy.

On Children by Kahlil Gibran

In the past 2.5 years, there are no passages I have thought of as much as these from “On Children” by Kahlil Gibran. Every time I read it, I either see something in new light or I am reminded of how much learning lies ahead for me as I aspire to be the person he describes.

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.

What consistently good communicators do

What consistently good communicators do: Prepare thoroughly, show up on time, seek to understand, be thoughtful about their contributions, pay attention to non-verbal cues, and follow up.

When they do all of this, they succeed in reaching the people they’re speaking to in the right context – unerringly.

It turns out that being a consistently good communicator is largely determined by what we do when we’re not trying to communicate.

Complimenting others when they’re not around

When you’re complimenting people you work with or know without them knowing, find a few moments to go back and let them know what you said.

I’ve often heard folks (or, in some cases, me) say some version of – “Of course she knows how much I appreciate her.”

I’ve come to realize that they often don’t know. And, even if they do, a small action like that can have a big impact on their day.

These small things are the big things in the long run.

Filing tax returns

As we get to wrapping up filing our tax returns for the year, I am left with one checkpoint and one reflection.

The checkpoint is the annual exercise of making the final update on the box on our accounts sheet that calculates savings for the year from Income – Expenses – Taxes. It is helpful to reinforce where we landed for 2018 and how each of these is trending from one year to the next.

The reflection revolves around everything these taxes pay for – including the infrastructure that I often take for granted. The quality of a society’s infrastructure determines the overall productivity. And, I’m grateful for the opportunity to contribute – in a small way – toward making the baseline a bit better for everyone.