Month: March 2025

Careful what you wish for

Aswath shared a post a couple weeks ago that I’ve thought about a few times since.

There’s a pressure to have goals and wants. We make it a point to ask kids and adults what their goals are. What do you want to be when you grow up?! Where do you see yourself in 5 years?! 

I suppose there are benefits of having a future vision, but goals also take up lifetime and mind space, and make you defer contentment and just be-ing. 

I know of at least a handful of people who wanted to be managers, advisors, or startup founders. They like the idea of it – the title or the perception of being a leader. But they end up disliking the job. I know people, myself included, who want to have a good community and circle of friends, but hate the process of meeting new people. Most people want to look fit, but dislike the routine of exercise and diet. 

For all your current and future aspirations, ask yourself if you’d actually enjoy the day-to-day and whole lifestyle aspect of attaining it and living it once you get it. If not, free up your mind for stuff that does meet the bar or just being at peace. 

There were two ideas in the post that have stayed with me.

The first about picking goals where we see ourselves enjoying the process. I chuckled at the examples – I’ve either seen them first hand or lived them

The other theme is one about intentional trade-offs. Some goals/objectives are worth the trade-offs. In other cases, trading the goals off gives us peace of mind.

Either way, choose intentionally.

The Grant Study and connectedness

Charles Duhigg wrapped up his book Supercommunicators with an excerpt about the Grant study. 

The Grant study is a famous 85+ year longitudinal study that started in 1938. It tracked a group of adults, then their spouses and kids for over 70 years. The story of the study is in itself fascinating – it was first funded by a businessman trying to figure out what characteristics he should be looking for while hiring storekeepers. After funding the study with $7 million over 20 years, he pulled off funding because he didn’t believe he was getting his money’s worth.

Then, in 1970, a group of psychiatrics pulled out the study results and journals and found an immense wealth of research about participants over time. So they began secured funding and began doing follow ups.

The most fascinating stories were those of people who were expected to succeed before the break. However, many of these turned out to be depressed human beings who were sad and lonely. And vice versa.

When the researchers eventually analyzed seven decades of data, they found some correlations.

Having loving parents made it easier to find happiness.

Possessing genes related to physical hardness and longevity was helpful, as was exercise and eating well.

Access to good education early in life as well as a lifelong commitment to learning also provided a leg up.

But one thing mattered more than anything else in terms of clearly predicting if a person was happy in their life – the quality of their relationships.

The people who were most satisfied in the relationships at age 50 were the healthiest and happiest at age 80. One researcher put it bluntly – “The most defining factor for happiness and satisfaction of life is love, not romantic love, but the love and connection with our friends, family, coworkers and their community.”

In sum, love and connectedness was causal to success and happiness. 

v36

At the end of every round trip around the sun, I write a summary of the biggest lessons I’ve learnt. They’re like software release notes and this is version 36. As I think of the biggest lessons I’ve learnt, I look for the biggest ways I’ve changed how I operate. To learn and not to do is not to learn after all.

To that end, if v35 from 365 days ago looked at v36, here are the 3 most striking changes –

(1) Show me the incentives and I’ll show you the outcome: This was the biggest learning from a challenging experience last year. I love the idea that “words are containers.” My incentives container was shallow and had little meaning attached to it. That experience deepened it and filled it with meaning.

This has transformed how I get things done. I spend significantly lesser time getting upset or annoyed at behavior that seems counter intuitive to me. Instead, I take the time to study the incentive and change it where I can.

It is hard to over-state how much of a change this is. While it has undoubtedly made me more effective, it is hard to overstate how peace it has brought to my day to day.

(2) Daily reading of 5 principles: The toughest experiences are amazing laboratories for learning. The same experience that taught me about incentives also instilled an urgency to crystallize my principles / my approach to life.

I had versions of this floating around – a mission statement, a collection of ideas from stoic philosophy and lessons I’d learnt, etc. I synthesized all these into 5 ideas I now read every morning. It grounds me and reminds me of the “what” and the “how” in my approach to life.

Years of writing here have taught me that effective learning is all about having the right system of reminders. I finally learnt that lesson.

(3) Health as the real #1 priority: I’d begun the journey of moving health to the top of the priority list at this time last year. But I don’t think I’d have foreseen the changes that have followed.

I’ve written extensively about this (thanks to Peter Attia, Casey Means, and Kelly + Juliet Starrett)- from changes to my diet and lifestyle, experiments with the continuous glucose monitor, daily mobility exercises, and so on. The difference, prior to this year, was that health was what I squeezed in when everything else was manageable.

Now everything is squeezed in once health is taken care of.

With that said, onward.

Until v37.

(past birthday notes/version updates :) –35, 34, 33, 32, 31, 30, 29, 28, 27, 26, 25, 24, 23).

Social identities and motivational interviewing

There was an interesting thread about social identities and communication in Charles Duhigg’s Supercommunicators.

The first is that a reminder of these identities have a noticeable impact in our behavior. For example, without any intervention, studies with graduate level students found that women consistently performed consistently worse than men in math tests. That’s because, by default, they were aware of a stereotype that women are worse at math than men.

However, in tests where these women were reminded of other identities, e.g. that of a puzzle-solver or a successful sportsperson, the performance differences disappeared.

These identities matter a ton in communication because conflicts escalate when they move from being about the topic to being perceived as threatening the person’s identity.

That’s where motivational interviewing comes in. With tricky issues, motivational interviewing focuses on asking questions to help a person understand both sides of an issue and why they might be for against it.

The goal isn’t to persuade – it is to simply understand both sides of the issues and reinforce that there are other identities they could choose. He made the point with fascinating examples involving polarizing issues such as gun rights and vaccines.

All in all, two takeaways –
(1) Conflicts often escalate because of a perceived threat to a social identity.
(2) Motivational interviewing is a useful tool in such situation to better understand how a person might think of both sides of an issue.

The non-existent popularity contest

One of the follies of new leadership is attempting to win a non-existent popularity contest.

Leaders have one job – to make the decisions that help the team win. This often means making tough, sometimes unpopular, decisions.

It is so tempting to just try to be liked and to make everyone happy. But that’s a road to nowhere.

The only antidote is to take charge when you’re in charge, to do everything you can to help the team win, and to treat everything else as noise.

Ironically, that’s the best way to win that non-existent popularity contest – at least among the crowd that counts.

Took 12 years

A wise friend shared an experience teaching a class of graduate students recently. He is a professional investor and shared some of the lessons he learnt – covering concepts like funding rounds and managing a board.

A student came up to him after the class and remarked that they found the content “rudimentary.”

This friend asked the student about their background and learnt that the student had done a 3 month internship at a venture capital firm.

“You learnt all this in that internship” – he enquired

“Yes” – said the student.

“That’s something. This took me 12 years to learn.”

The exchange made me chuckle.

It is a beautiful illustration of the idea that “words are containers.” This student might have known the words. But the containers weren’t anywhere as deep as that of a practitioner who’s been at it over a decade.

In other words, don’t confuse exposure for knowledge… and certainly not for wisdom.

Momentum can deceive

I’ve been thinking about this chart ever since I saw it earlier this week (H/T: Azeem’s Exponential View). It is just fascinating to see BlackBerry’s revenue trajectory even as the iPhone launched and began to take share.

Of course, these charts happen all the time with major shifts. In every one of these cases, the leaders involved attempted to cling on to the old reality and refused to accept the new one.

There are many versions of this chart playing out right now as we transition into the AI era.

And the game right now for everyone building technology is to learn from these and embrace the new reality.

Either you get it.. or it gets you.