Author: alearningaday

Success, failure, laziness, learning

I’m sure you’ve heard about or asked that famous question – do we learn more from success or failure?

Let’s put that question on hold for a moment for a quick question – I had submitted two assignments recently. I scored well on one and didn’t score well on the other. Guess which one I wanted to review?

This isn’t uncommon – the issue with debriefing after success is that there is almost no patience to make them meaningful. A debrief after a failure feels like a necessary post-mortem. A debrief after success feels like attempts to delay the party. Success, in short, makes us lazy and complacent. It makes us want to celebrate and then come back and get the next success (sometimes without putting in the work). Reflections after success can be as rich as those from failure. Just because failure makes learning seem more important doesn’t mean that it is. Perhaps that is why discipline is often cited as a key success ingredient – it takes discipline to overcome the resistance and get on with the reflection and learning.

And, of course, we can avoid the whole discussion by learning to ignore the result and focus hard on the process. Good decisions and a good process => good results in the long run. Reflecting on the process is an easier habit to instill and your process can almost always get a bit better. That’s when it stops being about winning and losing. A process focus is all about the playing.

Welcome to the infinite game.

Not choosing is choosing – a few thoughts about choices

1. The early men believed that everything in this life was in controlled by unknown powers. They didn’t have any reason to believe choice existed. The thinking around this changed over time and it was the free-thinkers in the ancient Greek society who asked interesting questions about the choices we have.

2. But, even the enlightened Greeks didn’t get close to thinking about the implications of choice. Over time, owing largely to expert gamblers, the theory of probability came to being. Probability represented an interesting intellectual and theological question as prediction was generally interpreted as a godly act. Could we actually have a say in our own future?

3. Probability soon lead to risk analysis. A group of insurers at the Lloyd’s coffee house in the city of London began using their understanding of risk and probability  and became the world’s first insurance group.

4. Thanks to these pioneers, we all intuitively understand the concept of choice and probability. We also understand the link between choice and consequences.

5. We don’t control everything that happens in this life. Far from it. We probably only have choices regarding about 10% of what happens. But, what we choose undeniably affects our experience of the rest. For example, exercising the choice to be happy not only changes the way we view a day. It could help us see opportunity at a time when others around us only see unhappiness and disappointment.

6. While it seems like a simple intuitive concept in theory, it has a few interesting nuances. For example, the number of choices we see is proportional to our mental maturity. The wiser we are, the more responses we see to a given situation. E.g.,  a child may react to a disappointment with tears but a wise adult always knows better. Hence, a person’s response to tough situations is a great measure of their wisdom / mental maturity. Wisdom brings with it an openness to new ideas and a willingness to adapt; these traits are critical in seeing more options in a situation.

7. Even if we have the maturity to see different choices in a situation, it is very hard to follow through. That’s because execution requires strength of character. Strength of character is what made Viktor Frankl special.

8. We are always making choices. Saying no is a choice. And, not choosing is another form of choosing. Economists call this opportunity cost – a brilliant concept.

9. So, when we choose not to think about the difficult questions that we know we must think about to be happy (what are my values? how can I live a life consistent with my values?), we are, in fact, choosing a less fulfilling path.

10. The most essential choices are those that are important but not urgent. For example, it is critical we choose to be healthy while we are healthy. If we’ve allowed the situation to get to “urgent,” we’ve just left ourselves a mountain to climb.

11. Leaving ourselves mountains to climb from time to time is a sure sign of poor choices. The best work isn’t done at the last minute. The best studying isn’t done the night before the exam.

12. It is easy to keep “learning by doing.” There are times when learning by doing is called for. But, most of the time, it is inefficient. It is a sign that we’re suckers of the activity illusion. Doing is not learning. Learning happens when we pause, reflect and think. This takes intention, time, and effort. Not choosing to do so means we’re shooting ourselves in the foot.

13. So, figure out how to deal with what is urgent quickly. Start spending more time on what’s important.

14. Abolish the phrase – “I have no choice.” You do. You just don’t choose to see them often enough.

The Endymion – The 200 words project

Here’s this week’s 200 word idea from the Mastery by Robert Greene..

John Keats was 15 when both his parents passed away. He was taken out of school and enrolled to apprentice for a surgeon. Keats, however, had developed a love for poetry. So, he read as many great poems as possible during his off hours at the school library. Soon, he began writing poems in the style of these greats until he decided to quit medicine and write his own poetry.

To compete his self-apprenticeship, he decided he would write a 4000 line poem on the Greek legend Endymion. He committed to writing 50 lines a day. 75% of the way, he came to hate the poem, his flowery language, and overwriting. But, by the end of The Endymion, he had learnt to write and edit at great speed and he had hit upon a style that suited him and met his own high standards. Also, he had overcome writer’s block forever.

With these lessons, Keats went on to produce some of the finest poems in the English language in 1818 and 1819 until he took gravely ill. It was perhaps the most productive 2 years of writing in the history of western literature – all thanks to the Endymion leap..

EndymionJohn Keats’ original draft of The Endymion – source and thanks to: Wikipedia, Time.com

‘In Endymion, I leaped headlong into the sea and became better acquainted with the soundings, the quick-sands and the rocks than if I had stayed upon the green shore and took tea and comfortable advice.’ | John Keats

Things that will never “end” vs. things that will

Things that will never “end”
– Cleaning vessels
– Failure
– Ironing your clothes
– The pain of growth
– Doing your dishes
– Organizing yourself and your work
– Hard work to get what you want
– The need for tough questions
– The effort needed to be happy

Things that you will not experience again
– This special moment in this place at this time – you grow up, your friends and family grow up, some leave, some stay, you leave, you stay, feelings change, relationships change, and time definitely moves on.

For things that never end – there is no point wasting even a single breath wishing they’d go away. There’s only more pain there. Embrace them. Love them. They’re integral parts of life.

For things that you will not experience again like these special moments – smile a lot, hug a lot, tell people how much they mean to you, have fun, learn and make them count. All we’ve got in this life is a collection of memories. And, like all great things, they are what we make of them.

Have a great weekend.

Omitted variable bias – MBA Learnings

One of the nicest things about being in graduate management school is that the classes have a lot to do with many of the things I have been reading about over the past few years. So, I’m excited to share some of my favorite learnings from classes under the “MBA Learnings” series. I don’t have a defined schedule for them yet but you should see these learnings pop up every once a while.

Today’s learning is a concept called “Omitted variable bias.” The origin of this idea lies in statistics but we all see this nearly every day of our lives. Most of the false claims we hear fall prey to omitted variable bias. And, let’s face it, we hear many false claims.

Here’s an example of a claim – “People who eat _____ (insert healthy product) have low cholestrol/better health in some other way.” That might be true on the surface but the equation misses variables like existing health of people who eat healthy food and amount of exercise done by people who eat healthy food. Without considering the entire picture, the claim is false. Badly conducted studies see one event frequently connected to another and incorrectly assume one event causes the other.

The omitted variable bias, thus, points to our tendency to frequently miss the entire picture. An application that comes straight to mind is when we interview for a new job/role. If things go well, we feel really pleased with ourselves (“I prepared really well”) and, when things go bad, we feel demoralized. There are a couple of important variables we often neglect –

1. The biases of our interviewers. Companies and interviewers select people they “get.” If your interviewers are strait-laced suit-wearing types, the chances that you’ll get a job you are well qualified for in jeans and a t-shirt is low. You only really influence one part of the outcome of an interview. A lot lies in the hands of your interviewers.

2. The culture of the firm. The interview process beautifully illustrates the power of culture. If a firm has a fairly homogeneous culture and, let’s face it, most great firms do. Then, being on the right side of the culture line puts you in great stead. If you have a “Googliness” rating of 9/10, you are likely going to be a hit with most of your interviewers at Google.

3. The dynamics within the firm. There’s a lot going on within the firm – internal candidates are being pushed for the job, your hiring manager is feeling the pressure because of a failed quarter, the company’s earnings call didn’t go great, etc. All of this stuff adds up.

So, what happens when we take omitted variable bias into consideration? First, we learn not to overstate or understate our contribution. Yes, our contribution matters. But, only so much. There’s a lot that lies beyond our control and there’s no need for the manic high or the depressive low.

Second, we learn that to distinguish between actions and outcomes. There is a saying that life is 10% action and 90% reaction. Perhaps interviews aren’t any different. Now that we’ve realized that people’s reaction to our actions is a large part of what happens to us, it helps to just direct our focus to that important 10%. By being the best we can be, we give ourselves a shot at maximizing the impact of that 10%. That’s all we can do. Once it’s done, focus on the next action as any time spent worrying about outcomes is time taken away from that next action.

From omitted variable bias to interview learnings to philosophy – you’ve got to love statistics!

Deep Nishar’s 2 hour story

A friend at Linkedin shared a story yesterday that Deep Nishar, soon-to-be former SVP of Products and User Experience, shared at his farewell.

Deep came from humble beginnings in India. When Deep was in secondary school, he learnt that a graduate from the school had been admitted at the Indian Institute of Technology. He understood it was rare and prestigious but didn’t know much beyond that. So, he asked this student if he could spend time telling him more about this. The student obliged and spent 2 hours with Deep explaining what the institutes were and how he might prepare to make it in. Deep took his advice seriously and secured admission when he graduated.

He went on to explain that that changed his life. It put him on a trajectory that saw him go to the University of Illinois Urbana Champagne, to Harvard Business School, lead Google’s efforts in the Asia Pacific and then play a key role in Linkedin’s growth over the past few years. All it took was 2 hours from a person who probably knew he would get nothing in return.

Deep’s advice to the Linkedin community was – if someone asks for a small amount of your time that could end up making a big difference to them, just do it. Don’t over think it. It might not mean much to you but it could mean a lot to the other person. And, who knows, it might even change the trajectory of their lives.

I loved this story. While we do occasionally get the opportunity to do big things, we get lots of opportunities to do the little things. We always have the choice to do the little things meaningfully.

It is stories like this that remind us how special this life is and how lucky we are to be here. Here’s to the little things… and here’s to giving small bits of our time to those who might benefit from it…

Disorganized and Organized

The first time my wife (then-girlfriend) walked into my room in university, there wasn’t place for her to sit. I had a huge pile of laundered and unfolded clothes on the bed. When it was time to go to bed, I would move the pile onto my desk and go to sleep. I don’t really remember if she said much but the look on her face said it all.

A lot has changed since then. My rooms have become much neater (not neat enough is what she would say though :-)). But, the biggest change has been in the way I manage my work. I have become close to brutally organized over time and I believe that has greatly helped me get more done in a day. Choosing organization over disorganization has been a deliberate, learned, and logical choice.

Here’s why – day-to-day living is tough. It will take every ounce of energy and stamina you give it and still ask for more. And, if you make it a habit to constantly associate yourself with circles where people are better than you, you will soon notice that intelligence or aptitude are hardly ever going to make a difference. There are some folks who can get away based on pure smarts. But, they are few and far between. A larger percentage thinks they can but find it hard to pull it off. No, the successful folk I’ve met are those who marry smarts and aptitude for what they do with thoughtful strategy and tactics to approach life, relentless focus, high self-discipline and a seemingly never-ending reservoir of grit and persistence for things that matter.

And, all of this would be null and void if you didn’t have your proverbial “sh*t” together.

Someday, I hope I’ll be as organized in my personal life as I am in my professional life. I keep misplacing things all the time because I don’t keep things in their designated places – that results in much more wasted time and unnecessary stress than I’d like. But, I’m beginning to get the idea and I’m beginning to understand the sort of systems that will help. It’s a start. Being organized is a way of life, a way of living well.

And, if something is worth doing, I guess it is worth doing well…

Running a distributed team – Building Help2Grow.org

Our team at Help2Grow.org consists of 14 individuals currently spread across 7 locations in 4 countries across 3 continents. While that makes for a cool story, it can quite easily be an organizational nightmare. Here are a few challenges –

1. Finding a time for our calls. We have been meeting once every 2 weeks almost without exception. But, with the recent addition of a team member in Europe, finding a time that works all the way from the Bay Area to Singapore is tough. So, we’ve decided to alternate between 2 slots every month. This way, the folks at one end have to give up their Saturday night once a month while the folks at the other end have to give up their Friday night once a while. And, a couple of folks will have to live with waking up at 5am and 630am respectively.

2. Sustaining momentum. Given the awkward timings and the sheer distances between us, it is easy for one person or the other to lose momentum. We’re all working on this on our weekends and the limited extra time we have during our weeks and one call missed can mean going a long time without contact with the team. Momentum is not easy to sustain.

3. Large amounts of communication via email. You know what they say about asynchronous communication. Yes, we know it is not the same. And, yes, we know face-to-face / video communication will be better. Luckily, many of the relationships are strong existing relationships. That helps. Then again, it doesn’t mean it is easy given the constraints.

On the flip side, these constraints make things interesting. We face the resistance all the time at Help2Grow. Wouldn’t it be easier to not do this at all? Absolutely. Would it be better? Absolutely not. We’re doing this for reasons beyond ourselves and we’re learning a LOT during the process. Besides, these are all amazing first world problems to have and serve as a wonderful reminder of the need to give back. So, how do we keep the momentum going?

Our best recent solution has been to think of it with an analogy – imagine the whole team is on a large boat, can we get 6 people rowing together for a consistent number of hours every week? While we do occasionally see spurts of activity from our team, we realize that there’s immense value in consistent application of effort. So, that’s what we’re working on these days – getting 6 people rowing together consistently. This means we’ve set up systems like vacation and activity trackers so we know in advance when people are going under water and we’ve created an overall management information system (more on this another time) which we use to guide our conversations every call. We might lose people on a call but we want to make sure our systems cover for them. And, one new metric added to the system is.. you guessed it.. whether we had 6 people rowing together this past 2 weeks.

That’s how we “row”l. :-)

This blog post has also been posted on the Help2Grow.org blog.

A commitment to front loading

Just for this week, let’s make a commitment to front-load our work. If it is due on Friday, let’s get it done by Wednesday.

If you only click into gear only when your backside is on fire, here’s to creating a schedule where your backside always seems to be on fire.

You and I both know we aren’t going to get out of it. Why, we have already taken the wiser path and embraced it. It’s just going to be less stressful.. and better.

And, sure, our attempts may result in failure today. That’s okay. We have a week to get into the zone. We will just try again tomorrow.

With a bit of reflection and tweaking, we do get better every day.

The low budget shark – The 200 words project

Here’s this week’s 200 word idea from Things a Little Bird Told Me by Biz Stone

When Steven Spielberg was shooting the movie “Jaws,” he wanted to create a realistic model of a shark so they could film it attacking people for all the scary scenes. However, this was going to be very expensive and beyond their budget. Faced with this constraint, Spielberg had a new low budget idea – shoot it from the point of view of the shark under water.

And, guess what? Way scarier!

Similarly, Herman Houser, whose company manufactures ARM chips that power a large proportion of the world’s cell phones, said the chips arose out of a computer chip making project where he gave his engineers no resources. They ended up creating a low cost low powered chip that didn’t really work for computers but was perfect for cell phones.

Twitter’s co-founders channeled constraints at a time when there were seemingly no constraints to publishing online. Twitter introduced a 140 character limit that clearly worked. And, lest we forget, Twitter was founded as a result of a two week hackathon.

Constraints
Source and thanks to: www.EBSketchin.com

‘The response to a general question like “how was your day” may be boring but a constrained question like “how was your lunch with Steve” will always be more interesting.’ | Biz Stone