Month: August 2023

I was looking at my connection requests on LinkedIn the other day.

I do my best to connect with people I’ve met or know in some capacity. But I also do my best to respond to people who write a message.

Roughly 80% of invites come without a personalized message.

Out of the 20% that do come with a message that share some reason for connecting, I always respond with some version of “happy to speak over messages.”

Less than 5% follow up.

I think these numbers are representative of what we see in life. Few make the effort go the extra mile.

And significantly fewer follow up.

Often, the act of following up alone is a stand out act.

It is why 80% of success is just consistently showing up.

Progress is rarely linear.

It is one of the reasons why making real progress is hard. Most give up before things turn around.

‘One of the things that happens is that during sleep, your brain cleans itself of waste that has accumulated during the day.

“During slow-wave sleep, your cerebral spinal fluid channels open up more and remove metabolic waste from your brain,” Roxanne explained to me.

Every night, when you go to sleep, your brain is rinsed with a watery fluid. This cerebrospinal fluid washes through your brain, flushing out toxic proteins and carrying them down to your liver to get rid of them.

“So when I’m talking to college students, I call this brain-cell poop. If you can’t focus well, it might be you have too much brain-cell poop circulating.” | an excerpt from Stolen Focus by Johann Hari

I didn’t realize the term “brainwashing” has a literal equivalent.

My wife always jokes that my response when things feel out of whack is to sleep. I’ve been a big believer in the importance of subconscious processing for a long while. I didn’t realize that all I was seeking was some… brainwashing.

“If you took our top fifteen decisions out, we’d have a pretty average record. It wasn’t hyperactivity, but a hell of a lot of patience. You stuck to your principles and when opportunities came along, you pounced on them with vigor.” | Charlie Munger

Don’t swing at every pitch.

Wait for the right ones, and then knock them off the park.

An executive I spoke with once shared a sage piece of career advice – “Don’t swing at every pitch.”

She shared a story about an ambitious colleague who was eager to do more than their current role. In time, an opportunity presented itself. Luckily, this person went to this leader and asked for her advice. She spent a bit of time understanding what he wanted and shared that she didn’t think this was the right fit.

A couple of months later, the same person got another opportunity that completely changed the course of their career.

“Don’t swing at every pitch” is fantastic advice because career transitions are expensive. There are heavy switching costs – so it makes sense that we pay them only when we feel confident that the juice will be worth the squeeze. It pays to be discerning.

Don’t swing at every pitch.

A manager of mine shared a thought once that stuck with me. Every person has a finite number of promotion events in their career. And, in most careers, these events are shared across managers.

So, as a manager, getting to celebrate a teammate’s promotion event is a very special thing.

It is a simple thought that’s stuck with me over the years. I like to go just a bit overboard with promotions. The exercise of putting together a great promotion nomination (some of which even warrant a tear), the moment we share the good news, the celebrations that follow – they’re all special.

And as is the case with many wonderful things in this life, the finite nature of the event makes it extra special.

I experienced a first mid-way through my monthly haircut. I looked down to find clumps of hair with more gray hair than black.

That got me reflecting about the passage of time – from the perspective of haircuts and barber shops over the years.

Funnily, the first thing that crossed my mind was a comment from someone who said I’d grow to experience the importance of a more expensive haircut than my erstwhile 10 pound staple.

I never have. The cheapest haircut around has worked just fine.

I thought about how I resisted haircuts through my teenage years. I also remembered my first semester of college – I refused to cut my hair for those 3 months because the thought of paying 10 Singapore Dollars for a haircut felt preposterous.

I got over all that.

Fast forward to today, I am borderline religious about my once-in-4-week haircut. It has become a family joke.

My mind then flitted to a random collection of ups and downs over the years. Of the many victories over the years, I realized that the most special ones were private victories. Eating better, exercising more, keeping my word more, responding instead of reacting more often, learning to keep my mouth shut and not needing to have the last word more than before, becoming better friends with equanimity, and so on.

These victories got me thinking about the battles I am currently fighting – attempting to reach for books instead of empty calories on my phone for example. Works in progress, we all are.

It occurred to me that I often find myself grateful for the people around me, for experiences I’ve gained, and for things that I value. But perhaps the greatest gift of them all is simply the ability to witness the passage of time.

Gray is good.

I saw a Jeff Bezos clip where he shared an anecdote from Amazon’s early days. He took us back in time to when Amazon started publishing customer reviews for books.

Book publishers didn’t like this. So they suggested that Amazon only publish positive reviews as they thought that’d help Amazon make more money.

To this, Bezos said “I don’t actually believe that [publishing only positive reviews would boost sales], because I don’t think we make money when we sell something. We make money when we help someone make a purchase decision.”

Insightful framing. It speaks to the difference between trying to make a sale to trying to get a customer to buy to helping them make the best purchase decision for them.

It resonated.

“Kung Fu lives in everything we do, Xiao Dre. It lives in how we put on the jacket, how we take off the jacket. It lives in how we treat people. Everything — is Kung Fu.” – Mr. Han, The Karate Kid (2010)

How we do anything is how we do everything…

Ambition is energy. And like all energy, it only works in our favor when it is channeled in the right direction.

The more the energy, the more the desire to let it out on every opportunity that shows up on our path. And because of the long term impact of career decisions, short-term optimizations can have significant unintended long-term consequences.

It is easy to confuse movement with progress.