Author: alearningaday

There are 4 topics we don’t cover in school that I wish we did –

(1) Managing ourselves – from our mindset to our productivity

(2) Health and personal wellness

(3) Personal finance / managing our money

(4) Building better relationships

There are a slew of other useful topics that I’d have loved to learn at school. But I haven’t found any others that are more central to living a good life than these.

And while I used to loosely check in on these from time to time, I’ve started incorporating check-ins on each of these as part of my weekly check in.

We used to be really bad at raising indoor plants. We kept doing what we thought worked, blissfully ignored the signs, and then realized it was too late. The plant was dying (or dead) and there was no coming back.

Thanks to my wife’s diligence, we’ve gotten a lot better at raising indoor plants over the years. That happens because she consistently invests time and energy, ensures they get what they need, and gets ahead of problems.

One of my graduate school Professors used to tell stories about former students who used to come to him for help. They shared how they were always traveling for work and then dealing with fractured family relationships. What surprised him was that they nearly always expressed surprise.

To which he’d say – “I’m surprised you’re surprised”

It turns out relationships are a lot like raising plants. As with raising plants, there often are points of no return. We need to keep investing time, energy, and care – in ways that work for the others in the relationship. We need to read the signs and get ahead of problems. And, hopefully, we don’t get in our own way and cause problems that wreck a functioning relationship.

Of course, not all relationships need to be maintained. Sometimes, the most important thing we do is replace a plant that wasn’t working in our space with a new one.

But it matters that we are proactive and intentional in how we approach all this.

Being proactive and intentional doesn’t guarantee good outcomes. We’re dealing with humans after all. But, like all good processes, we put ourselves in situations where we’re most likely to have good outcomes in the long run.

In the final analysis, that’s all that matters.

“People don’t communicate to each other on social media, they perform for each other.” | Jonathan Haidt

Buyer beware.

An under appreciated part of living a good life is knowing when you have it good.

“The way you think about pain is the way your life will turn out. Success is at the apex of the pain.” | Eliud Kipchoge

I watched a documentary about the Eliud Kipchoge’s “Ineos 1:59 challenge” where he showed that it was possible to finish a marathon within 2 hours. His excellence advanced predictions about human capability to achieve that mark by at least a couple of decades.

There were many parts of the documentary that were fascinating. It was inspiring to see his mental strength and his insanely high pain threshold. Eliud Kipchoge’s trademark response to pain when running a marathon is to smile. He radiated zen.

That, in turn, brought to mind this story from the 2021 Olympics.

Eliud Kipchoge was being held in a staging room during the 2021 Olympic Games in Tokyo. He and two other runners – Bashir Abdi from Belgium and Abdi Nageeye of the Netherlands – were waiting to receive their Olympic medals after the marathon race, which Kipchoge won for his second time.

Logistics of the awards ceremony meant the runners would have to wait for several hours in a cramped, dull, room with nothing to do but sit. Abdi and Negeeey later explained that they did what anyone else would do – they pulled out their cellphones, found a Wi-Fi network, and aimlessly scrolled social media.

Kipchoge didn’t.

Abdi and Negeeey said he just sat there, staring at the wall, in perfect silence and contentment.

For hours.

“He’s not human” – was Abdi’s assessment.

Well, he is. Just a very special one who developed focus and an incredibly high pain threshold by consistently doing things others weren’t/aren’t willing to do.

The word discipline is derived from the word disciple.

Discipline thus follows when we are a disciple to a philosophy, a set of principles/values, or an overriding purpose.

That is how we summon the will to subordinate what we want now to that greater cause or idea.

The arc of clarity bends toward simplicity.

“To be human is to confuse a satisfying story with a meaningful one, and to mistake life for something huge with two legs. No: life is mobilized on a vastly larger scale, and the world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.” | Richard Powers, The Overstory

Poignant and powerful.

Every time a team needs to make a hire, the need is urgent. Hires are made because some work urgently needs to get done. And that work nearly always fall on the rest of the team and the manager.

You can’t get a person in seat fast enough.

And yet, that’s when most hiring managers make the cardinal mistake. They settle. They over-weight the interviews or how good it looks on paper. They ignore a warning sign or don’t pressure test their assumptions with references. But their short-term pressure is alleviated.

Sometimes they get lucky, and the hire works out great. Often however, they find themselves dealing with one small problem after another for a sustained period of time.

Until the realization dawns that they made the wrong hire. They then come to that painful realization – the cost of the hire was significantly more than they thought.

And then the cycle repeats again.

It only stops when we internalize one truth – an open seat on the bus is always better than having the wrong person.

Never rush a hire.

We celebrated our 10 year anniversary in mid-2023. Ever since, I’ve been thinking about the biggest lessons I’ve learnt from our time together. I think these are the 3 biggest lessons I’ve learnt:

(1) You don’t have to have the last word. Attempting to “win” debates/arguments often results in us creating mountains out of molehills. Let molehills be. Let the small things stay the small things.

This has been a particularly hard lesson for me to learn. I can’t claim to have mastered it – my competitive instincts still occasionally get the better of me. But I’ve gotten better at it. I’m better this year than I was last year and orders of magnitude better than I was 10 years ago. I hope to continue to get better.

(2) Walk away when you are angry. When you’ve been together for most of your adult life (we dated for 6 years before we got married – so we’ve covered all of our adult life), you are going to have arguments. More so when you’re younger and more impulsive. And especially so when you are short of sleep or tired after a tough spell at work or, if you choose to have kids, for long stretches of time. ;-)

And these moments can often result in us saying things we don’t mean. Those words, in turn, cause damage that is often very hard to repair. Walk away when you are angry.

Of the 3 lessons, this the lesson I’d give myself the highest improvement grades.

(3) Give a lot more than you take – in a way that works for your partner. Stephen Covey encapsulated this idea in a lovely concept called “the emotional bank account.” Bad relationships have “overdrawn” accounts while great relationships always had a healthy – maybe close to infinite – balance. That happens when we give a LOT more than we take.

But that’s not all. People value different things. We read a great book when we got married titled “His Needs, Her Needs.” Gary Chapman has done work on love languages. All of these get at the same idea – don’t give what you want to receive. Give what your partner likes to receive.

Of the 3 lessons, this is the lesson where I have the most work to do. My wife outclasses me on giving a lot more than she takes. Competing with her excellence is futile. So I go back to doing what I do best – attempting to become a bit better every day.

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A wise executive once shared that she thought the most important decision most people make is deciding who to marry. I agree. I liken it to building a great team. When you have a great team, you complement each other, cover for each other, and are far better as a whole. When you have a bad team, the atmosphere is toxic and nothing meaningful gets done.

For those of us that choose to marry, our partners then become the first and most important team we build.

Choose well.

Then invest in making it great.