Author: alearningaday

Prioritization and effective time management are generally framed around what we say no to. We need to say no to hundreds of projects to be able to do justice to what’s important.

While that is true, saying no is hard for most folks. And, it certainly feels tiring to do so repeatedly.

An alternative framing I’ve found helpful is around what we say yes to. Whenever we say yes to something that isn’t important, we are effectively saying no to something that is.

A request for a 30 minute coffee tomorrow that isn’t high priority seems harmless. However, losing 30 minutes would mean staying later at work and spending less time with the family that evening. This framing ensures we put every yes in context and remind ourselves more regularly about what matters.

And, the more we remind ourselves of and say yes to what actually matters, the more effective our days become.

I’ve been speaking to folks who are in the process of preparing for interviews lately. While I have a long post on the topic, I thought I’d put together a short prep checklist.

When you prepare, consider allocating time among 4 types of questions –

1. Why industry (15% of your time): Industry questions target your perspectives on the industry you are applying for. Ideally, you are interviewing for an industry you are interested in and this part of your preparation just involves synthesizing what you think based on recent news, blog posts and events.
2. Why company (15% of your time): Company related questions typically judge culture fit and understanding of the context the company operates in. For the former, clearly understanding cultural norms and values (in companies that say they care about this) helps a lot. Amazon, for example, expects you to know their 14 leadership principles. And, for the latter, reading an analyst report or two that gives you a sense of the competitors and prospects can help a lot. If the company is public, reading their recently quarterly or annual filings is a must-do.
3. Why role (40% of your time): There are 2 important variants of role questions –
   • Do you understand what the executives in your function think about? (less common but interesting and important)
   • Do you know what you would do/what skills you would need in your first day? (this is the most common variant and is typically tested using a case which simulates a real problem to test how you approach problems)
4. Why you (30% of your time): “Why you” questions also typically ask two questions –
   • Would I like to work with you? (file this under the ambiguous “culture fit”)
   • Do your skills overlap sufficiently with the skills required for the job? (Understand the top 3-4 skills required and ensure your behavioral stories call these out – this is particularly important if you are switching careers)

Interview panels focus on different aspects of these 4 questions for various interviews. The “why role” and “why you” specific questions tend to be asked across interviewers.

I hope this helps.

PS: There’s a lot of luck involved in admissions or hiring. I hope you choose to learn from your experience either way and keep going, growing.

There have been many moments in human history that changed the course of civilization and what it meant to be human. These were few and far between until the last 500 years or so during which we’ve had a cluster of inventions and discoveries due to a combination of science, imperialism and capitalism. Each of these seminal discoveries – transportation, computing, the assembly line, etc. – led to new eras.

A few decades down the line, I think we will look back at the time when we began testing gene editing as one of those moments. The Wall Street Journey had a story about how China, relatively unhampered by regulation, has proceeded with tests using CRISPR – the revolutionary gene editing technology. From the article –

Crispr, for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, serves as the immune system in bacteria. In 2012, a team led by scientists in the U.S. and Austria published a paper demonstrating how they reprogrammed a particular Crispr system to enable gene editing.

The new tool—called Crispr-Cas9 after the natural system it uses—acts like molecular scissors, letting scientists cut or repair DNA. In 2013, U.S. scientists used it to edit the genome of human cells in the lab. 

The technology is easier to use than other gene-editing methods and less expensive. Lab experiments have shown it can correct some glitches that cause incurable diseases. Crispr has spurred heavy investment and a proposed Jennifer Lopez-produced television thriller.

Rewriting life’s building blocks, however, is fraught with scientific and ethical quandaries. One: Crispr might make unintended irreversible changes in people that may not emerge for years.

We’re still in the day one of the CRISPR technology. What happens when someone moves past fixing genetic diseases to other traits? Could we edit babies to have blue eyes?

I am sure we will have plenty of ethical debates and standards around CRISPR.

That said, I am also sure it will change what it means to be human.

I received a note from a long time reader who read yesterday’s post and wondered about conflicting messages with previous posts that typically talk about an internal focus.

I’ll start with a line from yesterday’s post  – Our external success, instead, is a function of how well we understand the exact nature of the problem others around us would like solved. 

The key word in the line is external. At the end of the day, every one of us needs success to be external and internal. Our external success comes from work – the organizations we build and the customer value we create. Our external success helps us earn wealth to live comfortably. Or, to put it differently, the absence of a certain amount of external success makes it very hard to internally successful and fulfilled.

My approach, over the past few years on this blog, has been to focus on internal success because this is incredibly hard. Wealth doesn’t guarantee fulfillment and happiness. Often, the relationship looks inverse as a desire for excessive wealth is caused by the absence of internal fulfillment. And, external success with fulfillment feels empty.

So, can there be one without the other? I go back to something a wise friend told me – When you find yourself asking if it should be this or that, take a deep breath and ask yourself if you can replace the or with and.

So, it isn’t internal success or external success. It is internal success and external success.

I typically write about these in terms of “process” and “outcome” and emphasize the importance of a focus on process and a directional outcome. But, processes are “good” only when they achieve their desired directional results. So, processes and outcomes must talk to each other.

Life is a balance between both.

PS: One final note – the same reader asked about my praise for Steve Jobs’ work when I had shared a line a few weeks ago from Scott Galloway’s newsletter that was critical of the idolatry of Steve Jobs. Again, I think there’s a difference between the idolatry of Steve Jobs “the person” (who was idolized) versus Steve Jobs “the product manager.” I may not love the former but I admire the work the latter produced.

We succeed when we create or offer something that the world wants or values. It is this value that generally translates into wealth.

We communicate well when the others in the room understand what we say.

Our clients and managers don’t appreciate us for the work we do. Instead, they appreciate us for the problems we solve for them.

This was the magic behind Steve Jobs’ work. He had a deep understanding for the problems we wanted solved and for the stories we wanted to hear.

Many of us often orient our narratives around what we did – “I worked so hard” or “I did so much” or “I said so many times.” Unfortunately, such effort counts for little.

Our external success, instead, is a function of how well we understand the exact nature of the problem others around us would like solved. As we get better at solving these problems for our world, we earn the right to do the same for “the world.”

To be present, we have to learn to let go and to approach upcoming moments with curiosity.

Letting go requires us to focus intensely on what we actually control – our response to the present moment. And, approaching upcoming moments with curiosity means letting our instincts to judge what is happening simply waft by. It is only when we let go of our instinct to label do we see how things really are.

Thus, when we learn to commit to the current moment by acknowledging how little we control and how much we have to learn, the monkey mind’s chatter recedes to the background. We, then, find the wisdom to discern what actually matters.

And, in that process, we learn to be present.

 

Like all books by the Heath brothers, there are a collection of remarkable stories in “The Power of Moments” (that you are all going to hear about over the coming weeks). One of my favorites was about Joshie – the stuffed giraffe.

Chris Hurn and family visited the Ritz Carlton on Amelia Island in 2012. Once they got home, they realized that they’d left their son’s beloved stuffed giraffe, Joshie, behind. Seeing his distraught son, Chris said – “Joshie is fine. He’s just taking an extra long vacation at the resort.”

That very night, the Ritz Carlton confirmed they’d found Joshie and would mail him back. Chris told them the story he’d told their son and wondered if they would mind taking a photo of Joshie relaxing by the pool.

In a story that has become part of stuffed giraffe folklore, the Ritz Carlton team sent multiple photos with Joshie having a great time at the resort – by the pool, having a massage, driving a golf cart by the beach and so on.

This story is obviously held a great example of customer service done right.

But, to me, it is a powerful reminder of how unplanned or uncomfortable situations can be transformed with a touch of empathy, creativity and thought.

All it takes is for us to realize that we can own the space between stimulus and response.

The Farnam Street Blog shared the transcript from a wonderfully insightful interview with Naval Ravikant. I read it a few days back and have been thinking about certain insights since. Today, I’d like to share 2 pieces that resonated. The first is about single player games and multi-player games.

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Socially, we’re told, “Go work out. Go look good.” That’s a multi-player competitive game. Other people can see if I’m doing a good job or not. We’re told, “Go make money. Go buy a big house.” Again, external monkey-player
competitive game. When it comes to learn to be happy, train yourself to be happy, completely internal, no external progress, no external validation, 100% you’re competing against yourself, single-player game. We are such social creatures, we’re more like bees or ants, that we’re externally programmed and driven, that we just don’t know how to play and win at these single-player games anymore. We compete purely on multi-player games. The reality is life is a single-player game. You’re born alone. You’re going to die alone. All of your interpretations are alone. All your memories are alone. You’re gone in three generations and nobody cares. Before you showed up, nobody cared. It’s all single-player.

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And the second is about timescales.

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One thing I figured out kind of late is that generally, at least in the tech business in Silicon Valley, great people have great outcomes. You just have to be patient. Every person that I met at the beginning of my career 20 years
ago, where I looked at them and said, “Wow, that guy or that gal is super capable. They’re so smart and dedicated and blah, blah, blah. Now we’ll just be friends or hang out or whatever”, and then I kind of forgot about them, all of them, almost without exception, became extremely successful. You just had to give them a long enough timescale. It never happens in the timescale you want or they want, but it does happen.

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I’ve written about similar themes a few times over the past few years. I wrote about the concept of path sharers alluding to the concept of a single-player game. I’ve also written time and time again about the focus on processes and the long run versus short run timescales. Things work out… in time.

But, it was refreshing to hear these framed in a different and compelling manner. I love the idea of single player games and of outcomes never happening in the timescale you want or they want.

I’ve learnt time and time again that it is easy to find ourselves caught in the rat race.

It is easy to forget that we aren’t rats.

And that it isn’t a race.

I’ve been thinking about the word “character” a fair bit over the past weeks. So, I decided to dig in to begin to understand what the word really means.

Character is defined as a set of mental and moral qualities that are distinctive to an individual. Stephen Covey said that our character is a composite of our habits. Because they are consistent, often unconscious patterns, they constantly express our character.

My synthesis is that our character is how we solve problems and face adversity. How we solve problems and face adversity, in turn, is the truest demonstration of our motives and values and how we reconcile the inevitable conflicts between them.

To understand Covey’s observation on how we express our character, we must understand Anton Chekov. Chekov wisely observed – Any idiot can face a crisis – it’s day to day living that wears you out, i.e., there are few harder problems out there than living an intentional life day-to-day.

That’s why our approach to living out our days (i.e. our daily habits) is a great reflection of our character.

Our character is how we think because how we think demonstrates our mental and moral qualities. And, how we think manifests itself in what we do.

Made me wonder – if I looked at my daily habits, what would I learn about my character? (i.e. my character as it is versus what I think it to be)