Author: alearningaday

v36

At the end of every round trip around the sun, I write a summary of the biggest lessons I’ve learnt. They’re like software release notes and this is version 36. As I think of the biggest lessons I’ve learnt, I look for the biggest ways I’ve changed how I operate. To learn and not to do is not to learn after all.

To that end, if v35 from 365 days ago looked at v36, here are the 3 most striking changes –

(1) Show me the incentives and I’ll show you the outcome: This was the biggest learning from a challenging experience last year. I love the idea that “words are containers.” My incentives container was shallow and had little meaning attached to it. That experience deepened it and filled it with meaning.

This has transformed how I get things done. I spend significantly lesser time getting upset or annoyed at behavior that seems counter intuitive to me. Instead, I take the time to study the incentive and change it where I can.

It is hard to over-state how much of a change this is. While it has undoubtedly made me more effective, it is hard to overstate how peace it has brought to my day to day.

(2) Daily reading of 5 principles: The toughest experiences are amazing laboratories for learning. The same experience that taught me about incentives also instilled an urgency to crystallize my principles / my approach to life.

I had versions of this floating around – a mission statement, a collection of ideas from stoic philosophy and lessons I’d learnt, etc. I synthesized all these into 5 ideas I now read every morning. It grounds me and reminds me of the “what” and the “how” in my approach to life.

Years of writing here have taught me that effective learning is all about having the right system of reminders. I finally learnt that lesson.

(3) Health as the real #1 priority: I’d begun the journey of moving health to the top of the priority list at this time last year. But I don’t think I’d have foreseen the changes that have followed.

I’ve written extensively about this (thanks to Peter Attia, Casey Means, and Kelly + Juliet Starrett)- from changes to my diet and lifestyle, experiments with the continuous glucose monitor, daily mobility exercises, and so on. The difference, prior to this year, was that health was what I squeezed in when everything else was manageable.

Now everything is squeezed in once health is taken care of.

With that said, onward.

Until v37.

(past birthday notes/version updates :) –35, 34, 33, 32, 31, 30, 29, 28, 27, 26, 25, 24, 23).

Social identities and motivational interviewing

There was an interesting thread about social identities and communication in Charles Duhigg’s Supercommunicators.

The first is that a reminder of these identities have a noticeable impact in our behavior. For example, without any intervention, studies with graduate level students found that women consistently performed consistently worse than men in math tests. That’s because, by default, they were aware of a stereotype that women are worse at math than men.

However, in tests where these women were reminded of other identities, e.g. that of a puzzle-solver or a successful sportsperson, the performance differences disappeared.

These identities matter a ton in communication because conflicts escalate when they move from being about the topic to being perceived as threatening the person’s identity.

That’s where motivational interviewing comes in. With tricky issues, motivational interviewing focuses on asking questions to help a person understand both sides of an issue and why they might be for against it.

The goal isn’t to persuade – it is to simply understand both sides of the issues and reinforce that there are other identities they could choose. He made the point with fascinating examples involving polarizing issues such as gun rights and vaccines.

All in all, two takeaways –
(1) Conflicts often escalate because of a perceived threat to a social identity.
(2) Motivational interviewing is a useful tool in such situation to better understand how a person might think of both sides of an issue.

The non-existent popularity contest

One of the follies of new leadership is attempting to win a non-existent popularity contest.

Leaders have one job – to make the decisions that help the team win. This often means making tough, sometimes unpopular, decisions.

It is so tempting to just try to be liked and to make everyone happy. But that’s a road to nowhere.

The only antidote is to take charge when you’re in charge, to do everything you can to help the team win, and to treat everything else as noise.

Ironically, that’s the best way to win that non-existent popularity contest – at least among the crowd that counts.

Took 12 years

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.

Momentum can deceive

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.

Control and arguments

“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.

That stretch of highway

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. :-)