Month: September 2019

The tire queue

I was recently in a self-serve queue to fill air in my car tire recently. At one point, however, the queue got stuck.

Instead of a quick one minute wait, we were now waiting close to five minutes without any sign of progress. This car owner seemed to just be walking up and down from the machine to the tire. Someone ahead shared his frustration at the situation and he finally got help from a technician at the tire center.

As the queue was fairly backed up, the technician helped the rest of of us get it done as well.

As I reflected on that incident, I realized that the issue wasn’t that he didn’t know how to work the pump. Instead, it was his unwillingness to ask for help. And, while it happened to him in this instance, it could just as easily have happened to me in another context.

It is natural for all of us to want to demonstrate capability – even in seemingly inconsequential things. However, that desire gets in the way of learning and progress.

Helpful reminder that becoming is more important than being in the long run.

The 30 minute introductory conversation

There is no tool I’ve found to be more effective in 10x-ing the productivity of a working relationship than a 30 minute introductory conversation.

How it works: Before you need to collaborate with a colleague/partner on a project or request them for something, go for a coffee or walk outdoors with them. Then, spend that time getting to know them with your pick of questions. My favorites are – i) “Would love to get to know your story starting from when you were born…”, ii) “What is the dream?,” and iii) “What do you like doing when you have free time?”

(And, if they’re interested, share your story too :-))

As simple as this sounds, I’ve found that it is easy to forget to do this in the face of the many urgent things that need to get done.

And, yet, this knowledge leads to the the understanding and trust that enables us to collaborate effectively.

The dream upgrade

Go to a dream home and we’ll find a neighbor with a dreamier home.

Land that dream job and we’ll find colleagues working with a more interesting scope/better manager/cross functional team.

Get that wonderful car and we’ll find someone we know with a superior model.

Our default state is to normalize stuff we might have been dreaming about for the longest time and then look around for upgrades.

Beware that default state.

Happiness follows gratitude – not the other way around.

All that remains and It’s later than you think

Dr Jessica Brandes and J R Storment were parents of an 8 year old boy who passed away 3 weeks ago. They both penned beautiful posts this week about this very painful experience.

In “All that remains,” Dr Brandes wrote about the fragility of life and pushes us to take the time to spend time with those we love.

And, in “It’s later than you think,” Storment reflected on his regrets and reminds us to be very intentional in how we prioritize our time.

I hope you take the time to read it.

Reminders of the fragility of this life are a gift. And, I’m grateful to Jessica Brandes and J R Storment for sharing their notes with us.

Nana korobi, ya oki

“Nana korobi, ya oki” is a Japanese proverb that roughly translates to “Fall down seven times, stand up eight.

We tend to be great scorekeepers of the times we fell.

Perhaps we ought to keep count of the number of times we stood up instead?

PS: Periodic reminder that failure is not the falling down. It is the staying down.

Sound writing style

A friend recommended Jason Zweig’s series on writing better. I started with the first post recently and loved it. There were two notes that stood out.

First, he cautions against writing in the first person – i.e., using phrases like “I think.” I’m not sure how much of this advice is relevant to writing a personal blog. But, it is advice I’ve heard before and I can see why it detracts from the content.

The second note that resonated was a quote on sound writing style from essayist H L Mencken –

“the essence of a sound style is that it cannot be reduced to rules — that it is a living and breathing thing, with something of the demoniacal in it — that it fits its proprietor tightly and yet ever so loosely, as his skin fits him. It is, in fact, quite as securely an integral part of him as that skin is…. In brief, a style is always the outward and visible symbol of a [writer], and it cannot be anything else. To attempt to teach it is as silly as to set up courses in making love.”

This hit home as I’ve wrestled a bunch with myself over the years on my writing style. For example, I’ve gone through phases where I made a concerted effort to avoid writing in the first person. On some days, I manage to do that. On others, I don’t.

Over time, I’ve just attempted to keep focused on improving my ability to synthesize what I’m learning and ship every day. That often means making trade-offs on the “right way to write.”

I’ve come to make peace with those trade-offs and begun to accept this eclectic mix as my own.

Why we value brands

An interesting take on why we value brands – we value brands not because they guarantee great experiences but because they reduce the chance of a terrible experience.

That, in essence, is the power of the McDonalds golden arches. They may not signal a great meal. But, they sure as hell signal predictability. And, in times of change or novelty (think: travel), that predictability is worth a lot.

It occurred to me that the 4.5 star x 1000+ reviews combination on Amazon is the equivalent of the McDonalds brand when we’re shopping online.

(H/T: Alchemy by Rory Sutherland)

Just one thing this time

I was mulling a new weekend project today. For a change, I shut it down before the thought germinated.

As unexciting as that might sound, it marked an important moment in my learning journey.

Over the past months, I’ve been working hard to simplify my life so I can focus on the two things that I expect will move the needle on my long term happiness – learning and contributing at work and being as good a partner and dad as I possibly can.

There are a list of things I’d like to do more. For instance, I’d like to find time to play more soccer. I’d also like to write more long form posts. But, in reality, for the first time in a decade, I’ve barely played soccer in the past months. And, I haven’t done any long form writing on tech and product management either. So, before I get excited about a new weekend project, it helps to remind myself that there’s an existing backlog for when I have more time.

Of course, I’d like to do more than just focus on working and being there for the family. But, I haven’t found a way to do that without sleeping less and messing with my health – that, in turn, would mean doing a sub par job on the two things that matter at the moment. So, we’re back to square one.

It took a bit of reflection after having our second child last year to arrive at this conclusion. I care deeply about being an engaged member of the family. And, after ~7 years of career finding, I’m finally 2+ years into a role that is a great fit and intend to make the most of the steep learning curve that lies ahead. I’ve come to accept that there’s little time left after embracing these constraints.

It is lovely to experience this sort of focus for the first time. I don’t spend any time on weekdays or weekends wondering when I can squeeze a bit of time to do this or that. I can just be – assured in the knowledge that there’s nothing else more important.

For many years, I gave lip service to the idea of fewer things done better. I’ve written plenty about prioritization over the years and did a passable job at it. My answer in the past was always to find some way to fit as much as I could in. But, as I realized in the second half of 2018, that approach doesn’t work with hard constraints.

One of my favorite ideas in the realm of prioritization is that saying no to things that don’t matter enables us to say yes to things that do. I’ve shared this many times over as a wishful note to self.

It is only now that I am beginning to draw clear boundaries, embrace trade-offs, and say yes to things that matter.

I’m hoping I’ll be able to make more progress down that road in the coming months – both at home and at work.

Electric screwdrivers and the right tools

We recently bought an electric screwdriver.

For whatever reason, I assumed that the cost of buying this might not be worth our occasional assembly and repair use case. Thankfully, after getting frustrated at the challenge of assembling some furniture (we moved recently), I checked that assumption and realized buying one was a no brainer.

If you haven’t used one yet, the difference is night and day. It was an instant 5x productivity boost.

While there’s a lesson in here in checking our assumptions, there’s a more important lesson in examining what tools we use on a day-to-day basis. The right tool can provide incredible leverage.

A game of giants and cruelty

Tim Urban, the wonderful blogger from “Wait but Why,” is back with 3 fantastic blog posts as part of his series on how to think about societies. This is an ongoing series – one I’d highly recommend. The first post starts here.

I was processing Tim’s third post yesterday when I saw this powerful Saturday editorial on the Quartz newsletter this morning.

A lawsuit filed earlier this week in the US shows it in chilling detail: The dehumanization of asylum seekers and migrants is routine in detention camps—and it doesn’t spare children. According to these children, guards shout at and threaten toddlers and babies; there is often not enough to eat, and clean water is harshly rationed. Children are crammed in sleeping areas too small for everyone to lie down, without blankets, in cold rooms where lights blare 24 hours a day, and frequent check-ins interrupt what little sleep they manage. Girls receive one sanitary pad per day during their periods, left to bleed through their pants and wear soiled clothes.

It’s in line with the directives of a government intent on turning cruelty into policy: Only weeks after it confirmed it would not give flu vaccines to families at border camps, the Trump administrationquietly suspended (pdf) delayed repatriation for severely ill children. America, in short, is ready to deport children with cancer.

Inhumanity, it seems, is contagious. In Italy, babies and children have been repeatedly kept at sea for days by a government that fears—hates, even—migrants, no matter their age. In Turkey, authorities are cracking down on the Syrian refugees that Europe didn’t want. Globally, more people have been forcibly displaced from their homes in the past five years than at any previous time in history, and more than half of the world’s 26 million refugees are children. Many are met with systematic dehumanization coupled with apathy in the places where they hoped they would be safe.

This suffering cannot be blamed on politics alone. There’s a silent majority that is allowing it to continue—not protesting, not calling our representatives, not taking to the streets. Hundreds of millions of us who keep going about our days as if children weren’t being treated as less than humans in our own countries. There’s a word for this: complicity. —Annalisa Merelli and Annaliese Griffin

Word.