Author: alearningaday

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.

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.

“The stronger the ego, the more it’s rooted in time. You depend on past events for identity and future for fulfillment.” | Eckhart Tolle

Powerful.

“While there are many factors that determine if a romantic relationship succeeds or flounders, one key factor is whether makes the people in it feel more in control of their happiness or less in control of their happiness.” | Supercommunicators by Charles Duhigg (paraphrased)

In detailed examinations of conversations among unhappy couples, researchers found that the partners tended to focus on trying to control the other person. For example, they might say “don’t go there” or “don’t use your voice against me” or “you always do this all that.”

Happy couples instead focused either on controlling themselves or the environment. For example, they’d talk slower and make sure that they kept that cool. The key with happy couples was focusing on things that they could control together and ensuring that they kept an argument as small as possible, instead of letting it expand into other areas and throwing “the kitchen sink” at each other.

Of course, these lessons apply to all kinds of arguments/disagreements.

There’s a stretch of highway on the way to work that had been under construction for about 9 months.

In the first 6 months of construction, I kept hoping the end was near.

Around that time, I was in a conversation in a public place with a colleague who was complaining about that stretch. A friendly stranger overheard the conversation and said – “Hey, I’ve been here since the 1970s. We’ve never gone more than 2 years between large sections of that highway under construction. How do you think we went from 2 lanes to 6?”

It made me chuckle.

I had fallen prey to a “I’ll be happy when” scenario.

Those don’t work.

It helped me make peace with that bit of construction for the most part.

I’m glad I did because, 20 months later, it’s still not done. :-)

“What was the secret, they wanted to know; in a thousand different ways they wanted to know The Secret. And not one of them was prepared, truly prepared to believe that it had not so much to do with chemicals and zippy mental tricks as with that most unprofound and sometimes heart-rending process of removing, molecule by molecule, the very tough rubber that comprised the bottoms of his training shoes. The Trial of Miles; Miles of Trials.” — John L. Parker, Once a Runner

Beautifully put. It resonated.

Padawans struggle to consistently drive clarity from ambiguity.

Jedi masters excel in getting to clarity regardless of the messiness of the situations.

Grandmasters specialize in speed to clarity.

That’s often the difference between competence and mastery. Competence gets us to better. Mastery gets us to better faster.

If you want to have back up capacity, you have to be okay with not optimizing every bit of your current capacity.

So, if you want to be ten minutes ahead of time for every appointment, you have to be at peace with the fact that you will often not make the best use of those ten minutes at hand.

Similarly, if you have a back up battery at home that you also use every evening during peak hours, you have to make peace with not utilizing every bit of available capacity if you want to save it for an outage.

On the flip side, if you want to optimize your time till the last minute, you will have to make peace with being late from time to time.

Or, in the case of that back up battery, you have to be okay with the refrigerator losing power on a day where you’ve used up all that safety capacity. That’s just the cost of not having a back up.

You can’t have it both ways.

The key then is to invest in back up capacity for high stakes scenarios. And, in all others, to make peace with the consequences of not having back up capacity.

Again, you can’t have it both ways.

I don’t look forward to steaming/ironing clothes.

But it is infinitely easier to get them done two weeks at a time vs. to let them pile up and do them all in one go four or five weeks later.

With every passing week, the inertia becomes stronger even as the time required becomes bigger.

Applies to everything in life that needs to be done regularly.

Applies also to any large task that can be broken into chunks.

My wife shared a Reddit post that had a beautiful message – You’re not an image, you’re an experience. Here’s the note in full.

“As humans, we were never meant to see our own faces or bodies this much, and that’s why so many of us today, struggle with self-image and self-worth issues.

For most of history, the only time we saw ourselves was through reflection in bodies of water like ponds, lakes or rivers. Even then, it was blurry so we couldn’t hyperfocus on our imperfections such as hair, bicep size, eyebrow shape, nose size, pores, wrinkles etc.

We could see everyone else but we could never really compare because we didn’t know how we really looked like. We simply showed up as our best selves without feeling self-conscious. Then mirrors were invented and we could see ourselves everyday, then photos, then videos and now with social media everything is almost entirely edited and distorted from reality.

We then started finding flaws that we were never supposed to notice or pay much attention to. Others don’t study our faces the way we do analyzing every angle, every blemish, every fault. Others see you in movement, in laughter in moments, that’s why beauty has never ever been just about looks and our appearance, its always been about how you carry yourself, your confidence, your character and your energy. You were never meant to be one-dimensional, you were created to be animated, lively and expressive.

So friendly reminder, you were never supposed to see or think about your face or body this much. Yes, be presentable, but go out, show up as your best self and enjoy your life without caring too much about how you look, you’ll attract the right people!!”

A wise reminder – it resonated.