Month: December 2022

Every day, life asks us 2 questions –

(1) What do you want?

(2) What are you willing to give up to get it?

The quality of our life is directly proportional to our ability to consistently have good answers to these questions.

I was standing on a beach the other day staring into the ocean.

Every time I find myself experiencing the waves crashing into my feet, I find myself wondering what lessons I’m meant to learn from these waves. And I typically walk away without any real flash of insight and a lingering sense of disappointment at my inability to understand the lesson.

This time however, I changed the question. Instead of searching for the lesson, I asked myself – what do you see?

I saw relentlessness, consistency, and a clarity in purpose – an awe-inspiring combination. And, by virtue of repetition, the ocean made the combination mundane.

An inspiring thought that finally gave me the answer I was seeking.

Sometimes, all we have to do is change the question.

2 questions –

(1) What percentage of the population will say they value exercise over television?

(2) Of the percentage who say they do value exercise over television, how likely is it that they pay more per month for television (via the TV they own + Netflix/Disney+/pick-your-cable-equivalent and via the time they spend on it) than a personal trainer/gym?

Values aren’t values until they cost us money.

On our recent travels, we experienced the kindness of strangers on two separate occasions. On both occasions, I’d made a mistake that could have caused unnecessary pain.

And on both occasions, acts of kindness saw us through.

It is always wonderful to be a recipient of such acts of kindness. I felt a rush of gratitude and a sense of relief each time.

These incidents also made me wonder how often I’ve been that kind stranger to other humans.

Not as often as I’d like – came the answer.

Here’s to fixing that.

We’re in the season of end of year reflection and I was speaking to a teammate who shared a fascinating reflection. Her top objective for the year was to learn how to be better at her job. And that objective, in her word, was “knocked out of the park.” It was a year full of transformation – she’d learnt a lot.

However, she hadn’t realized the trade-off that came with this learning. She was deeply uncomfortable for a significant part of the year and had to deal with lower mental health for significant portion while she figured out how to improve her game.

She shared that she thought it might be like school – go to class and attempt to absorb content. And she walked away from the year appreciating that learning doesn’t work like that in the trenches on a job. At least not the kind of learning that changes how you operate.

It was a fascinating reflection – one that resonated deeply. It is one I’ll be sharing every time I meet folks who talk about wanting to accelerate their learning.

Are they willing to accept the discomfort that comes with it?

The quality of our thinking is directly proportional to the quality of our reading.

To think better, we must read better.

I shared my experience with ChatGPT the other day. Generative AI is here and we’re going to feel the ripple effects for years to come. I ended that post with a note about unintended consequences.

One of the challenges with predictive AI is that the output is based on all the data it is trained on. That can result in all sorts of algorithmic bias. A powerful example of this was in a powerful post by Melissa H on the MIT Technology Review titled – “The viral AI avatar app Lensa undressed me—without my consent.” TLDR – as an Asian woman, the avatars showed hyper sexualized images while her male colleagues got to be astronauts and inventors.

These give a sense of just how much work lies ahead – to debias training data while also improving our ability to generate quality output when that isn’t easy.

But, perhaps more importantly, it points to the second and third order consequences of adopting transformational technology. There’s a lot of goodness that will be unlocked from these advances.

We just have to be mindful and thoughtful about the unintended consequences.

I shared a note yesterday about an analogy I have for the process of approaching work worth doing – walking down a corridor with motion activated lighting. In response, Will wrote in sharing a quote that he found inspiring during his P.hD thesis.

“Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”| E.L. Doctorow

It is the same idea – more articulately stated.

A couple of reflections –

(1) Most good ideas we have are either identical to or have echoes with ideas from the past/from different cultures. Over the years, I’ve loved hearing about these echoes – often via email responses from many of you (thank you!) – as they’re a reminder that there are a few fundamental principles that are causal to a more fulfilled life.

(An aside – someday, I’d love to attempt compiling these principles together. Not this day though. :-))

(2) Working with the analogy of driving at night in the fog, I think the most important decisions we make are (a) which road we are on (direction) and (b) how we drive (process).

Driving on the wrong road is disastrous and will take us nowhere. And driving too fast, without intention, and without bringing the rest of the folks in the car along can be equally disastrous.

Pick direction and run with good process. The path will reveal itself.

One analogy I have for the process of approaching work worth doing is walking down a corridor with motion activated lighting.

You can’t see the end of the corridor when you start walking. But you still have to take that first step – and when you do, the next few steps become illuminated.

Every step we take reveals the next few. The important thing is to keep moving and keep our faith in the light showing up.

And it does.

The amount of communication required in a relationship is inversely proportional to the trust in it.

The biggest implication – early on in relationships, err on the side of over-communication.