Charles Duhigg, in his book Supercommunicators, has a neat question to understand the expectations of those we’re communicating with – does the other person want to be helped, hugged, or heard?
People who want to be helped are open to problem solved. People who want a hug just want the support. People who want to be heard just need a listener.
The first step in effective communication requires recognizing what kind of conversation is occurring.
“If it is important to you, you’ll find a way.
If it isn’t, you’ll find an excuse.” | Anonymous, seen on the walls of a Jiujitsu gym.
It resonated.
Three decades ago now, Ben Horowitz, an early Product Management leader at Netscape, wrote a short essay on product management. The essay focused on a set of behaviors that differentiated a bad product manager from a good one. One of them, for example, was writing weekly updates.
There are many reasons why weekly updates are a good indicator of good product management. Writing something weekly requires discipline. And as good writing takes logical thinking, a strong weekly update often indicates the ability to structure your thoughts and communicate logically.
All of these are useful assets for a Product Manager.
But they’re just indicators at the end of the day.
In the final analysis, a Product Manager’s success is based on the success of the products shipped. A PM’s ability to figure out what needs to be built and then building it in the most effective way possible is far more important than indicators like weekly updates.
Similarly, many wealthy leaders have structured morning routines. But a structured morning routine does not a wealthy leader make.
It is easy to get attached to such indicators as they’re easier to control. But it is folly to get too attached to these – especially if they aren’t resulting in the outcomes that matter.
Don’t confuse the indicator for the outcome.
There’s an insightful moment on Masterchef when Chef Graham Elliot cooks alongside the home cooks in a breakfast challenge. As part of the challenge, each home cook needs to prepare one elevated breakfast dish in 30 minutes. Chef Graham, however, shares he will cook three.
And, yet, if you look at 0:25 of this short clip, you have Chef Christina Tosi asking Chef Gordon Ramsay what he thinks the home cooks will learn from Chef Graham.
To this, Gordon Ramsay responds – “If there’s one thing they can take away tonight, it’s the organization.”
They go on to show how organized his station is. While the home cooks move frantically to cook their dish, he just takes the time to get his station impeccably organized.
It is an inspiring example of the kind of focus, organization, and calm that signals mastery.
I was reflecting on the idea of energy moving from commodity to technology.
The key difference is that technology just keeps getting better over time.
This, in a simple sentence, is what electrification has done to cars. Cars have become technology. Their software keeps getting better – every year. And, with every iteration, the battery technology becomes better, safer, and more performant. All those marginal gains add up.
It is interesting to apply this analogy to our mindset. When we have a fixed mindset, we behave like commodities. We are who we are – extracted and fixed.
However, when we have a growth mindset, we behave like technology. We just keep getting better and keep bending that learning curve – constantly aggregating marginal gain after marginal gain and letting them compound to make a game-changing difference over time.
Matt Ridley’s “How Innovation Works” was rich with insight. Here are 7 that I took away –
(1) “The main ingredient in the secret sauce that leads to innovation is freedom. Freedom to exchange, experiment, imagine, invest and fail; freedom from the expropriation or restriction by chiefs, priests and thieves. Freedom on the part of consumers to reward the innovations they like and reject what they don’t.”
This note from the final chapter is a point Ridley makes again and again. History has repeatedly shown free societies to be more innovative.
(2) Innovation works better bottoms up vs. tops down and when there is less burden of regulation. Example after example demonstrates how empires resist innovation (and even outright ban it). And, for a simple example of how burden of regulation kills innovation, we can look at how Europe’s regulatory changes over the past decade have only resulted in incumbents getting more entrenched and in the citizens of Europe getting access to sub-par technology.
(3) Regulation hobbles innovations because it increases the cost of learning. When learning costs go up, it is hard for us to iterate. Nuclear energy is a stand out example of this.
Also, regulation changes incentives. Instead of people spending energy to invent new things, they spend their energy in making friends with the government to bend the rules.
Iteration is key – it is what has saved millions of lives from diseases like whooping cough and malaria.
(4) “Innovation happens not within but between brains.” The “great man” theory is one we’ve created out of convenience and due (more recently) to intellectual property law.
Innovation has consistently arrived because of humans who chose to build on the work of their rivals and predecessors and combine existing ideas in interesting ways.
Crucial innovations are often thought to have been accelerated by war. However, most innovation has happened incrementally and has been driven forward by many people.
Innovations come when their time comes – regardless of the people involved.
(5) Growth never needs to stop. The nature of growth is such that we first figure out how to produce more. Then we learn how to produce more with less. Until our efficiencies far outweigh our appetite.
Light is a great example. Once the cost of light goes down, more people leave their lights on. However, the efficiency of LEDs mean we’re more efficient than ever before.
(6) Every innovation has been resisted. Politicians in India and Pakistan resisted the Green revolution. Europe was prejudiced against the humble potato.
These are examples of innovations that made their way through (most good ones make it over time). However, there are examples of innovations that haven’t – in multiple places because of successful smear campaigns.
Then again, there are others that were delayed. For example, Dyson fought a decade long battle to get its innovative bag-less vacuum cleaner approved in the EU (crazy, I know).
In effect, there is no such thing as a no brainer. As long as incentives to resist something exists, resistance will exist.
(7) “The main theme of human history is that we become steadily more specialized in what we produce, and steadily more diversified in what we consume: we move away from precarious self-sufficiency to safer mutual interdependence.”
Beautifully put.
This next stop in our “Our world is awesome series” is at The Maasai Mara. As I shared in last week’s post about the Serengeti, the Maasai Mara park is a smaller part of the broader Serengeti ecosystem that is located within the Kenya border. The stones below are the only separation between these parks.
The story behind this separation is interesting. Tanzanian officials chose to shut the route with passport control inside the parks down in 1977. The story that the locals tell is that the Tanzanian Prime Minister of the time believed that they had a better shot of getting tourists to see other parts of Tanzania by forcing them outside the park. The official story is around environmental protection and ecosystem management.
Regardless, even though there exists a route from within the park, you have to take a day trip to get from one park to the other.
There are noticeable differences on either ends of this journey. As the northern end of The Serengeti ecosystem, The Maasai Mara is more hilly and greener. It felt more lush and seemed to pack a higher density of wildlife. It was also a smoother experience with better gravel roads within the park – the Serengeti felt more rugged. Both parks were well-maintained with diligent rangers. However, there was a perceptible difference in how tourists were dealt with around the parks, in border control, etc. – Tanzania felt a more tourist-friendly in the sense that we didn’t need to watch for being taken for a ride. Finally, the diligence of the folks maintaining the bathrooms in the Serengeti was awe-inspiring. A true example of doing small things with extraordinary care.
Diatribe on differences aside, let’s get back to the park. “Maasai” is homage to the Maasai tribe who live in these lands. “Mara” means spotted – capturing the area’s distinctive look with sweeping plains dotted by Umbrella Acacia trees like the one below.
Giraffes love these Acacia trees and the Acacia trees communicate with each others to save each other.
A massive old tusker.
One of the terms used in these parks is “The Big 5.” Sadly, this is the name of 5 animals who were poached/hunted to near extinction. The Big 5 include the lion, the leopard, the elephant, the buffalo (below), and the rhino.
Of the big 5, the two-horned Rhino remains endangered. All the rhinos in the Serengeti are in one conservation area. And we were fortunate to see one of the few rhinos grazing in the Mara triangle – a mom with her baby.
One of the highlights of our time in the Maasai Mara was seeing a leopard in close range.
The most famous spectacle in the park is when the Great Migration crosses the Mara river. At this spot, hundreds of thousands of wildebeest and zebra make it to the other side of this narrow crossing to eat the fresh grass. It is an annual bonanza for these crocodiles.
They might look motionless and disinterested. But we saw them spring quickly to action as soon as a few zebra came over to drink some water. We were too early for the crossing – but the various documentaries we’ve seen make it one of those sights I hope we’ll be able to come back for.
That’s the thing about these iconic National parks (in Africa and otherwise). They play with your sense of time. Time manages to both stand still and fly by in these parks. On another dimension, you see all these impressive predators and prey who’ve passed on wisdom over generations – always seeking a way to survive.
It is easy to come to parks like this and just “check the box” on animals you’d like to see or take a photo of. But the more you do the opposite – simply immerse yourself in the ecosystem, the more you come face to face with the sheer magnificence of these ecosystems – how little we understand and how much more we have to learn.
And you’re left just wishing for a little more time.
Maybe next time – you think.
And then you leave hoping there will be a next time.
(“Our World is Awesome” series: Ngorongoro Crater, Grand Teton NP, Yellowstone NP, Grand Canyon NP, Lauterbrunnen Valley, Tarangire NP, Serengeti NP)
“Where the rats get in is not where they chew.” | Anonymous
When something happens, it is natural to look in the vicinity of the event.
But it is highly likely that we’re missing the learning that matters. We all know we need to avoid the careless mistake. We know we need to pay more attention or react a bit better under stress.
It is far more interesting to dig into the conditions that led to the mistake.
Or put differently, we must understand the conditions that would help us switch to a better habit.
To find gold, we must look upstream.
Where the rats chew isn’t where they got in.
Many love the idea of learning. They love the positive associations – growth, great teachers, and the like.
A small percentage of the many appreciate it once they realize learning is just a nice descriptor for signing up for uncomfortable experiences that stretch us, reflecting deeply on all the moments of pain, and synthesizing those reflections into changes in how we’ll operate.
No surprise – after that realization, fewer still make it a point to habitually seek it.
Learning is always easier said than done.
The British Cycling team were a mediocre cycling team for over a century coming into the early 2000s. Then they hired Dave Brailsford as their Performance Director.
Dave Brailsford had learnt about “The Aggregation of Marginal Gains” during his time in business school and believed in the idea that small gains would compound to create large impact.
So, Brailsford and his team began looking for small 1% improvements that included-
Each of these changes were small. But the compound impact of all of this led to the British team dominating the Tour de France and Olympic cycling events for a decade.
Compounding small changes -> Incredible results.
Never underestimate the power of aggregating marginal gains.
A Learning a Day 