Month: March 2023

I’ve been thinking of all of these ideas a lot recently – fitness, resilience, constructiveness, and perspective.

Fitness is the starting point. If we don’t feel good, we won’t get much done.

Resilience comes next. When we attempt to do things, we will inevitably face setbacks. The bigger the attempts, the bigger the setbacks. Resilience is what sees us through.

Constructiveness is what moves us from surviving something with resilience to thriving. It inspires us to build from the bricks we have around us – some of which may even have been thrown in our direction. :-)

And perspective helps us remain aware of and grateful for all our blessings – many of which we frequently take for granted.

The powerful thing about all 4 of these ideas is they cannot be taught. Lectures on perspective or fitness don’t help. It is why kids make fun of stories about their parent’s struggles.

They are learnt and earned from experience and self-reflection.

A good friend who is an amateur marathon runner shared an insight about running.

If you’re feeling the pain during a long run, there’s no point thinking about it. Thinking about it only adds more stress into the system. And the higher the stress, the more likely we’ll experience a drop in performance.

Instead, if you manage to relax and focus on other things, it is likely you’ll find reservoirs of speed and energy you didn’t know you had.

As in running, so in life.

One of the highest leverage skills we can pick up is knowing when to sit with a problem vs. attempt to resolve it.

Knotty problems take time to solve and typically don’t lend themselves to attempts at resolving them quickly.

The hard part is making peace with that tension – for there is plenty of tension – and letting it push us and transform our thinking enough to be able to find the right solution.

We installed this 3D world map on one of our walls recently.

Source: Hyperiwood.com

It has since been a daily reminder of just how small we are in the grand scheme of things.

Maybe it’s time to put up a 3D rendering of our galaxy next.

#Perspective.

2 years ago, Seth shared a post titled “Finding your voice.” I took two things away from that post –

(1) Given how often we use our voice, we need to make sure we pay attention to it. And I hadn’t spend any time thinking about how I could take care of my voice.

(2) I found this video with two simple exercises to strengthen our voice. I committed to doing them every morning.

Up until then, I had a habit of clearing my throat during meetings as I felt my voice fail me over the course of a day or week. I did this a few times every hour on some days.

Since I started doing these exercises in Jan 2022, I think I’ve reduced how often I do that by over 95%. It has become so minimal now that it stands out on days I do it. For instance, I missed my vocal exercises on a day this week and I found myself clearing my throat a few times in a meeting in the morning.

Game changing.

I’m amazed I didn’t pay attention to this habit of clearing the throat. Maybe it felt small enough to be inconsequential? I’m amazed by the transformative power of a small change in my morning routine.

The small things are the big things.

PS: Thanks, Seth!

When working to align groups of people, I’ve found one idea to be true in over 95% of instance- a group of people with the same incentives converge to the same (right) answer when they share the same context.

The key is the shared context.

The cost of being great at something is being mediocre or below average at things you’d love to be good at.

“Culture can’t be taught, it has to be caught.”

The culture of a team or an organization isn’t the list of words on the wall that is shared as part of the onboarding.

It is absorbed – by reading into people decisions (who is promoted, fired, and hired) and by understanding how decisions are made.

Culture can’t be taught, it has to be caught – indeed.

“The darker the sky, the brighter the stars.”

I thought of this idea as I was mulling the importance of contrasts. We need to experience pain to understand joy, downs to appreciate ups, and losses to savor wins.

That, then, is the upside of challenging situations. They help us appreciate the stars around us – literally and metaphorically.

Ryan, our CEO at LinkedIn, recently shared the highlights of an interview with Satya Nadella, his boss and CEO at Microsoft. Satya has architected one of the great corporate turnaround stories during his time as Microsoft’s leader.

There were 3 insights from the interview that resonated deeply with me –

On focusing on the job at hand – “There was never a time where I thought the job I was doing, all through my 30 years of Microsoft, that somehow I was doing that as a way to some other job. I felt the job I was doing there was the most important thing. I genuinely felt it.”

On preparing to become CEO without focusing on it as the end goal – “It’s not like the day before I was CEO somebody said, ‘You’re gonna be CEO.’ At some point things happen. You are the CEO and the question is, have you prepared all your life to be there, without having made that the goal?”

On three traits he sees in leaders – Leaders bring clarity to ambiguous situations, create energy, and can work with what’s in front of them to help un-constrain the team. In his words – “Leaders don’t wait for the perfect pitch or the perfect weather to perform, you gotta take the hand you’ve been dealt and with all the constraints.”