In the long run, a big lever in building strong relationships is a loop that involves –
(a) Being upfront about what we want
(b) Being flexible enough to receive feedback on whether what we want is compatible with what the other person/group needs at the moment
(c) Building the self-awareness and judgment to want the right things.
Periodic reminder to self – you can’t always do big things. But you can always do small things with extraordinary care.
They add up.
As we make important decisions in our lives, we often seek answers to questions like – “Who do I want to be?” or “What should I do?”
In such moments, it helps to remind ourselves that it is just as helpful to start with – “Who don’t I want to be?” or “What shouldn’t I do?”
It is likely you’ve heard about some of the drama surrounding Open AI in the past week. Nearly 1 year ago, Open AI took the world by storm with Chat GPT – an exponential advance that arguably brought conversations around AI to the mainstream.
With all the noise and news cycles focused on AI, it is easy to forget that there are two other exponential advances in the works – especially around RNA based therapies and renewable energy. Here are a couple of updates on these that caught my eye.
Let’s start with RNA based therapies. I wrote about Doctor Katalin Karikó in early 2021 when I learnt about her pioneering leadership on RNA based therapies that helped marked the beginning of the end of the COVID pandemic. I made a comment about her story having all the ingredients for a Netflix/Amazon limited series show. Now that she is a 2023 Nobel prize winner*, I’m hopeful that will happen.
The amazing thing about RNA based therapies is that we’re just at the beginning of what will likely be an incredible decade for medicine. Herpes, Malaria, Sickle cell anemia, and heart disease are all ailments with RNA based solutions currently being developed/tested. There’s going to be plenty more coming here.
Next, onto renewables. There’s always something amazing to say about solar these days. Chile, for example, hit 60% of electricity from renewables in the first 10 months of this year. That is incredible. And such progress on renewables is the main reason we are tipped to avoid the 3 degree C climate tipping point.
However, we are still on track for 2.5 degrees C – sadly, this isn’t something we want to be “on track” for as the consequences are still going to be severe. And if we’re going to bring that down further, we’ll need more options for energy storage that don’t depend on rare-earth metals like Cobalt and Lithium.
That’s why Swedish company Northvolt’s “Sodium-ion” battery is a true breakthrough. We need more such alternatives.
The pace of change in AI is a lot faster (months) than that in renewable energy (years) and biotech (~decade). But their impact is just as profound and worth keeping an eye on.
*Funnily, I was so inspired by her work then that I’d reached out to her for an interview for this blog. She kindly responded and asked if we could try a few months later (this was just as the vaccines were rolling out around the world). I didn’t follow up. Perhaps I should have taken my chance before the Nobel prize came. :-)
(1) Friendships can last for a reason, a season, or a lifetime. This remains the most enduring truth I’ve learnt about friendships. Some bonds are incredibly intense and short. They work phenomenally well for a period of time and then just fade away with a change in circumstance.
Others last an entire season of our life before inexplicably fading away.
And some others manage to survive many seasons, go through some inevitable ebbs and flows, and endure.
We don’t choose our families, but we do choose our friends. It takes both sides to consciously make a choice to make a friendship work – especially in the absence of proximity. We must do the work to earn our friendships – but we must also understand that they won’t all last. That understanding alone helps us find peace.
(2) Proximity first, structures next. Our ability to build strong relationships – any relationship – is a function of time and attention. It is why proximity helps. In the long run, the health of a relationship is proportional to the amount of the time spent in person and the strength of the memories created. Proximity solves for one half of that equation and makes it easy to solve for the other half.
In the absence of proximity, structures that help us invest in the relationship go a long way. Structure include monthly video call or yearly reunions. The more memorable the reunion, the better.
Maintaining such structure takes effort. It is why friendships fade away with time – see (1).
(3) Letting the small things go. Our biggest aide in maintaining lasting friendships is our ability to let the small things go.
Small grievances that we hold onto have a way of compounding in our minds and destroying relationships. Like all good things, friendships take significantly more time to build and maintain than to destroy.
A friend of mine spent many years going deep into game design. During this time, he played hundreds of board games and emerged with a simple framework for what constitutes a strategy game.
A strategy game has choice. The more the choices, the more likely it is a strategy game.
By this definition, “Risk” isn’t a strategy game (he jokingly called these “non game games”). You’ve got few real choices to make. Instead, you rely on luck and some negotiation to win games. Snakes and Ladders is the poster child game of this category. Just roll the die and move on.
Monopoly, too, would be predominantly a game of luck vs. skill.
Settlers of Catan, on the other hand, is an example of a strategy game as there are many resource allocation choices to be made.
It’s been over a decade since I had this conversation. But it clearly resonated. As our kids have gotten older, we’ve slowly been adding a few games to our collection. And his framework has helped us make decisions.
Two lessons from this experience –
(1) Strategy is making decisions that involve trade-offs. That’s why choices in games are a marker of the strategic thinking required.
(2) Simple frameworks go a long way in helping us make better decisions as they help us better appreciate the trade-offs.
I was thinking about a long drive we planned to go on the other day. My mind briefly drifted to the traffic situation.
Oof – what if the traffic gets really bad in the time it takes us to get out of the house?
I began visualizing the frustration of a long drive.
Now I began feeling flustered.
And annoyed at myself for not getting out earlier.
Until I realized it was all in my head.
The only thing I could do is get ready quick and get out of the house. Every other course of action was pointless in that situation.
I marveled at how our thoughts can take us down unhelpful rabbit holes if we let them and make us worry needlessly about things outside our control.
Our thoughts are powerful. Channel them, we must.
PS: The traffic turned out to be fine by the way. A few delays aside, it wasn’t anywhere close to the worst case scenarios I nearly began worrying about.
I shared a post with my reflections from “The Inner Game of Tennis” a few weeks back. Rebecca, a long time reader, had her reflections stuck in her drafts. Thankfully, she found that note and sent it over. I immediately asked for her permission to share this as it changed my perspective.
Thank you, Rebecca, for sharing.
I was a very intense competitive ski racer when I was younger and I remember a single interaction with a coach on a recruiting visit (it’s the only convo we ever had) that changed literally everything for me. He told me that his absolute best racer often had the slowest times in training… until the last 2-3 runs when he would really go for it and beat everyone. Before that, he was testing. Trying. Playing.
I had always been on the “FASTEST RUN, EVERY RUN” train (as are most ski racers) and I remember thinking — oh wow, I could make this whole run about “what if I started turning earlier” or “what if I only focused on the one really hard turn” or “what if my hands were in a different position than usual” — and, shocking to me — there were no consequences to this “play.” And, with practice, I found that I was actually able to make progress on some of the issues that always plagued me (hands too low, line too aggressive). Sometimes I’d just pick a descriptor and try to ski like that (what if I skied like a river? like a zebra? like a hummingbird?)
I try to keep this play testing in mind and make it into a game whenever I’m teaching kids anything.
Okay, we’re kicking the soccer ball — let’s kick the ball 5 different ways (making some of them really goofy) — with our toe, with our inseam, with the bottom of our foot, backwards, etc. Then let them pick one to work on — okay, let’s kick the ball like a hummingbird! Now like a lion! How’d that feel? And by trying a lot of different things they get a much stronger feeling for what happens when you touch the ball than just “kicking it” the same number of times.
As the adult / coach / parent / aunt, I see my role as demonstrating play and testing, always pointing out when I ‘mess up’ and when I have a breakthrough. Basically, I see my style as keeping it very light hearted, while retaining a degree of focus.
Your post today reminded me of that conversation. I bet that coach has no idea what an impact he had (sadly, I can’t recall his last name and he’s long left the school…). Another good lesson to remember — you often have no idea of the ripples you leave behind, for better or for worse.
“There is no product or service more cost effective, ecological, sustainable and recyclable as the one we do not use.” | Philippe Bihouix*
*lightly adapted to add cost effective
Someone I know has a simple and effective model for the responsibilities of a leader – to bring clarity and energy to their team.
There are many great frameworks for leadership. They all rhyme and draw on similar principles.
This is one that has resonated a lot of late.
A Learning a Day 