Month: July 2025

The only kind of conviction that really matters in the long run is the one that comes from within.

Comparison and gratitude have an equally powerful effect on the joy we experience – just in opposite directions.

“The way out of uncertainty isn’t certainty, it is clarity.”

Changing the uncertainty level in the environment around us is almost never in our control.

Getting to clarity on our response to it always is.

One of the most nefarious tools the resistance within us employs is to get us to habitually speculate about the future rather than focus on taking action in the present.

Such speculation starts off interesting but soon simply succeeds in stopping all progress with analysis paralysis and worry. There’s no end to asking “what if” questions.

Speculation works like salt. A pinch is great. Too much spoils the dish.

Our energy is best focused on figuring out how to do the best with what we have right now.

The quality of the future isn’t determined by the quality of our speculation. It is determined by the quality of the action we take today.

I was exchanging notes about some financial predictions with my financial advisor the other day. He shared something that stuck with me – It is easy to predict something will go wrong. It is hard to predict when... and it is the “when” that decides if money is made from the prediction.

Truth.

I read an article by Dan Shapero – an executive at Linkedin – many years ago that I’ve thought about often since.

Dan’s article begins by sharing some context from when he became a manager.

“Why did the chicken cross the playground? To get to the other slide.”

That’s an awfully lame joke (it was printed on my 3 year old son’s popsicle stick), and yet, if you are a manager and tell that joke to your team, people might laugh… they need to laugh because they need you to like them.

When I took my first management job, I fell into this trap. To be honest, although I’ve had my funny moments, I’m no standup comic. Yet, as soon as I got promoted, I got more laughs. So I started telling more jokes… any joke in fact. I thought I was getting funnier, but in fact I was getting less funny… and bordering on annoying. I’d lost my feedback signal. I had become less self-aware.

The article goes on to make a salient point – Your social compass needs to come increasingly from inside of you,

I’ll push on this further and say there are two truths –

(1) As you become more senior in an organization, feedback becomes more subtle. Your self-awareness needs to be attuned to subtle feedback.

There’s a trade-off here if you don’t calibrate your feedback. Over time, you’ll get plenty of feedback – direct and indirect from various sources. So it is important to not overreact but just as important to not be oblivious.

(2) The most important feedback you can learn to read is feedback that reflects a lack of confidence in your leadership. Ignore that for a while and you’ll just find yourself surprised one day when you’re told you’re fired.

Every once a while, I jump into the shower and remember just how much of a privilege it is to take a warm shower.

Growing up, a common bath mode we were used to was “the bucket bath*.” You had half to three-quarters of a bucket of warm water. Refills weren’t possible either because there was a water shortage or because there wasn’t a geyser. In case of the latter, it would take a lot of time to pre-heat hot water.

And we were lucky to always have access to a bucket bath.

There were so many places where this was a luxury… that continues to be the case today.

The word infra means below or beneath. Infrastructure is a collection of the many systems below the surface that makes our life possible. It is, by nature, transparent. When it works, we just see right through it.

There’s a lot of incredible infrastructure that makes that glorious warm shower at the end of a long day possible.

Infrastructure I take for granted ever so often.

*Comedian Kenny Sebastian has a hilarious segment – it brought back so many memories.

“Every month at Jimmy’s dealerships, whoever sold the fewest cars got fired. No exceptions, no negotiations. Sounds cruel? Jimmy saw it differently: “They were never going to be successful at selling cars, so why shouldn’t they cut their losses and become mechanics or teachers?” Everyone knew the rules when they signed on.” | On Jimmy Mattison – The Farnam Street blog

This excerpt was shared with the descriptor – “Brutal clarity beats false kindness.”

Such a performance-based culture with clear consequences for low performance is both not for every situation while definitely being underused as a way of operating.

Brutal clarity does beat false kindness in the long run.

My approach to reading and synthesizing lessons is to take notes of the ideas that resonate the most and write about them over the course of a few weeks. I broke tradition with “The Courage to be Disliked” with a daily series of sorts over the past week or so.

As I shared a few times, I found the book to be revelatory. In retrospect, it is because it unified ideas that have resonated strongly with me under one roof. Adler’s approach is at the heart of the many powerful ideas that have changed my life and that I’ve shared on this blog over the years.

While I’ve shared excerpts over the past week, I thought I’d bring it all together into a 7 point summary –

(1) The overarching theme in Alfred Adler’s approach is that “life is simple.” By this, his philosophy asserts that freedom, happiness, and meaning are all within reach. We don’t need to over complicate this. Our problems are not one of ability but of courage.

(2) You have the means to choose your life path. You’re not controlled by your past, trauma, or environment — only by the meaning you assign to them. You are free to choose goals that help you go where you want to go.

(3) All problems are interpersonal problems – use problems as a trigger for growth. Most of our issues — anxiety, anger, insecurity — come from how we relate to others. We typically react by over-compensating for what we think we lack with bouts of inferiority or superiority. Use such moments as a trigger to strive for learning and growth.

(4) Freedom arrives when we summon the courage to be disliked. You must be willing to live by your values, even if others don’t like it.

(5) Cultivate “horizontal relationships” and embrace “separation of tasks.” Vertical relationships assume someone is in a position of relative authority or power. They typically involve attempts to control the other person.

Horizontal relationships involve mutual respect and a focus on controlling ourselves – including accepting our normal self. Horizontal relationships thrive on a “separation of tasks” – where we do what’s in our control and empower others to do what’s in their control. We can lead a horse to water but cannot make it drink.

(6) Happiness comes from contribution. Not from being praised or special, but from feeling useful to others and connected – this is described as community feeling or “Gemeinschaftsgefühl“.

(7) We keep life simple by keeping a bright spotlight on the present. When we’re on stage and see a bright spotlight, we can’t see much else. If we have dim lights on the other hand, we will be able to look beyond what’s around us and attempt to see our past and present.

Do the best you can with what you have where you are.

“The problem is not one of ability, but of courage.” | The Philosopher in The Courage to be Disliked by Ichigo Ishimi and Fumitame Koga

The reason this book has been as revelatory as it has been is because it helped me understand why some powerful ideas resonated in the way they did.

This note about ability vs. courage (hence the “courage to be disliked”) is a recurring theme that follows a simple thesis – most people are not limited by talent or past trauma, but by fear. 

It is at the heart of the idea of “the resistance” – the internal force Steven Pressfield described as opposing all manner of growth.

And it helped me better understand Marianne Williamson note – “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.”