A friend wrote to me yesterday forwarding a rather brutal “No” she had received. It sounded like the kind of “no” you’d receive from an absolute idiot. But, it hurt her.
Of course it did. I’ve been there. And that’s why I thought I’d write about 3 things I attempt to remember when I get rejected. This isn’t a “3 ways to deal with rejection” because dealing with rejection is really hard, and really personal. There’s no running away from how you feel. It’s easy to trot out the “it’s not personal” line. But, it is. Well, at least it tends to feel so. That’s why many spend entire lives running away from being rejected..
– Get rejected a lot more. Learning to get rejected is like developing a muscle. Like any muscle development, the early stages involve a lot of pain.
– It will still never be easy. It does eventually get better. You develop a thicker skin, get hit by self doubt a lot less. I won’t claim rejection becomes easy. It almost never does. But, you learn there are other things more important than more important than fear..It will just feel a little better.
– Rejecting others. We say no to others ourselves. I see a marked difference between folks who’ve been rejected a lot in their lives. The cruel no’s come from those who haven’t experienced it themselves.
I’ve had the opportunity to try out many kinds of work and the most difficult of those was giving out flyers at train stations in Singapore hoping one or two would convert. It was a painful experience as people treat you like crap as they walk by you. Since then, I’ve never been able to say no without a nice smile to anyone giving me a flyer..
Finally, congrats on being rejected, if you have! Failure teaches us things too. Once we get past the emotion, we learn a fair bit.. often, whom to avoid.
I think there are two ways to “help” someone – we can “be of help” or we can “help.”
“Be of help”
“I am thinking of taking friends for dinner to ….. Quick thoughts about the place?”
“Would you mind taking a quick look at my resume and give me feedback in 5 minutes?“
“Honey! Do I look fat?”
With all 3 questions, there is only one answer. It’s a simple distinction. When you are asked to be of help, you are asked to affirm someone. It doesn’t matter what the truth is. All that matters is you tell them what they want to hear.
“Help”
The same 3 questions would be answered very differently if you were looking to really help someone. Let’s work with the same examples.
– The dinner discussion could revolve around the kind of place this friend is looking for. (“What ambience are you looking for?”)
– The resume discussion could easily be much deeper. (“What are you trying to convey?”)
– The “Do I look fat?” discussion could be about exercise. (“Are you looking to start an exercise routine?”). Don’t try this at home, of course..
My point here is that it’s two distinct ways of approaching things. The ask is different. The first is a tad superficial and about affirmation while the second involves digging deep and making the effort to understand the context and the back story.
If I have to build on resume’s (thanks to a resume side project being a constant factor in the past 3 months, I’ve been blogging about it a bit since it’s been on my mind), depth is generally a quintessential part of the result. It’s easy to help someone with a few format-level changes. The magic comes in a 3 step process –
– Understand the context (why did the person do what they did so far? i.e. past. why is the person applying to …..? i.e. future) – Craft the 1 line pitch (why you?) – Improve the presentation (how can we ensure the little things look great?)
There’s no short cut around these things. You either go through the process or you don’t. The first two steps take a bit of thinking and the final step typically takes 12-14 drafts. It is deep and painful.
From my own past experience, I’ve learnt that depth is generally not appreciated (more on this later..). More often than not, we, as humans, prefer the superficial. Having been on the other side, I’ve learnt that I must ask for help only if I want “help”, and as far as possible avoid “being of help.” This realization helped me understand why very few people make it through my intensive resume program. (Haha)
This insight hit me yesterday evening and I think I finally understood why I told a young friend her “being of help” question was one that didn’t work for me. I wasn’t able to articulate my reason. Now, I know. It just doesn’t work for me. If I’m involved, I prefer digging in. It’s not always pretty but it’s the way I prefer..
I know better now. I just need to learn to say “no” nicely when I see a “be of help” request to come through.
This week’s book learning is part I of a 5 part series from ‘So Good They Can’t Ignore You’ by Cal Newport.
Heads up first – this is one of the best books I have read. It is a manifesto-style book and doesn’t have a traditional story approach. I will be covering all 4 principles as in the book and hope to do them justice.
Cal’s advice is opposite to conventional wisdom – “Don’t follow your passion. Rather, let it follow you in your quest to become so good that they can’t ignore you.”
He points out that if a young Steve Jobs had taken his own advice (in his famous Stanford commencement speech) and decided to only pursue work he loved, he would probably have been a popular zen teacher at the Los Altos Zen Center. But, he didn’t follow this simple advice. Apple Computer was decidedly not born out of passion, but instead was the result of a lucky break – a “small-time” scheme that unexpectedly took off!
Research has shown that the happiest, most passionate employees are not those who followed their passion into a position, but instead those who have been around long enough to become good at what they do. Scientists have found that motivation requires us to fulfill three basic psychological needs:
– Autonomy: the feeling that you have control over your day, and that your actions are important – Competence: the feeling that you are good at what you do – Relatedness: the feeling of connection to other people
Never was it found that “matching work to pre-existing ability, interests, passions, or personality” is important for motivation.
I think Cal’s book is brilliant because he’s tested all of what he says and I find that it all ties very well with the principles I have picked up over the past few years, like deliberate practice.
He makes a compelling case and it is a book that I would highly recommend, should you be looking for an addition to your bookshelf. More to follow in the other 3 parts of the series, of course..
And, in a funny way, it seems to tie into what Viktor Frankl might say – Be so good and passion will ensue simply because you forgot to think about it. :-)
Here’s to listening to letting our passions follow our excellence, this week!
I woke up this morning and felt this sudden urge to check out guitar lessons of two songs. The first was a song I’d sung as a child on stage and the second is a more recent favourite..
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And as I checked the lessons out of YouTube, I managed to play the key parts of both.
Now, I can’t express what that means to be in words. I’ve been dreaming of playing the guitar since my teenage years. And I was toying with the idea of playing the guitar around this time last year. So, to be able to play songs of my choice just by checking out a chords list or a video in case of a finger picked song, it is just an incredible feeling.
At some point before the end of the year, I am sure I will reflect on my year learning the guitar. But, for now, I just feel very thankful to my guitar teacher for giving me this gift. A gift that just keeps on giving..
And that’s when I thought of ALL my other teachers – teachers who have given me skills, ways of understanding the world and making sense of it, that I use day in and day out without realizing it. I am not a self made person. Far from it. I’ve been made, almost crafted by so many wonderful individuals who have taken time out of their lives to do so. Some intentionally, some unintentionally. Some formally, some informally. Some through books they wrong, and some in person. Some knowingly, and some unknowingly.
It’s thanks to all these teachers that I am able to enjoy and appreciate this life. I hope to do a bit of what you did for me, and pay it forward.
Thank you for all you have done. It’s a wonderful world..
requires us to do just one thing – to take a step out of ourselves and view the situation from the ceiling.
The biggest difference between humans and animals is our ability to look at ourselves from a different perspective. So, if we tune ourselves to take a step out and view the situation from the ceiling (the specific location i.e. “ceiling” is intentional as it makes it easier for us), we take a huge step forward. The moment we take our position in the ceiling, we see things in a different perspective. Suddenly, a negative situation can appear funny!
And Viktor Frankl attests that in the deep dark environment of a concentration camp, a sense of humour is what preserved that bit of humanity in him. The takeaway for me was that if he could manage a sense of humour in the toughest of surroundings, I think I’ll be able to just fine.
The funny thing about periods when things don’t seem to work is they seem to all happen at the same time. And we have a tendency of lumping unrelated incidents together to indulge in some self pity.
I realized that just this morning. It’s easy to get into a negative rut when a couple of very small things don’t go your away after a tough few days. From my vantage point at the ceiling, I realized that I needed to process situations in isolation instead of lumping it all together as one negative experience. And I think I managed to make the best of it, as impossible as it might have seemed at the start.
A negative rut never helps. If you feel like you’re in one, take a step out, head to the ceiling and look at the situation again. It’s likely you’ll laugh a bit and just make the best of the situation..
Situations are what they are. But, our reactions are what we make of them..
An hour in a negative rut is an hour wasted. We are fortunate to be alive. Let’s make it count.
Have you ever tried stopping an ant from getting to where it wants to go?
It’s a simple exercise really. All you have to do is find an ant and try and stop it from moving forward by placing your hand or feet in it’s way.
If you haven’t ever done this, try it.
I challenge you to find me an ant that will quit trying to find a way. In fact, it’s likely you will tire quicker than it will. If, however you don’t tire, it will likely head another way. It’s incredible. It will just NEVER give in.
And if that isn’t enough, I challenge you to find me an ant that is purposeless in it’s motion i.e. an ant that doesn’t seem to be heading somewhere. It almost seems to me that it doesn’t quite matter where… as long it’s moving, making progress.
Feel like you are stuck, or have hit a wall?
Or that you don’t have enough inspiration in your life?
We always have a choice. Wait for that dream job to get back to you, or keep applying. Wait for that award shortlist, or keep shipping. Wait for that venture capitalist to say they funded you, or keep building.
Sometimes, it all works out as per plan and as per expectation. Most of the time, there are twists in the tail. And even if it seems to work out, life still throws in the occasional curve ball.
How to get around it? There’s no getting around it. Anticipation, elation and disappointment are a part of life. External stimuli do that to us.
The only solution is to outweigh the external stimuli with internal strength. Just repeat “Gotta keep chipping away. Gotta keep chipping away…”
If you can fill the unforgiving minute With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run, Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!
I’ve been on an interviewing hiatus the past few months and I am excited to be back! I am sure you will notice the shift from interviewing leaders in the arts arena to technology entrepreneurs and venture capitalists (haha).
Today’s interview is someone I’ve known for a few years now. I met Michael Bodekaer in a RealAcad camp in Singapore. Michael is a very successful entrepreneur who IPO’d a successful company in his mid 20’s. He is an entrepreneur at heart and is currently in Bali working on a technology start-up incubator and creating many ventures along the way. I hope you enjoy the interview..
About Michael Bodekaer
Michael Bodekaer is an extremely passionate tech entrepreneur, focused especially on highly interactive online services and top-notch Mac-like Windows client-server application development using WPF, WCF, Silverlight and C#. He co-founded several tech startups over past 12 years, 2 exited successfully with a nice bonus attached to it. His core skill is rapid execution and product development, as well as a burning desire to develop world-class startups. He loves to enjoy life, travel the world and do extreme sports, as well as read books and attend seminars on NLP and personal development.
Rohan: Can you tell us your story, Michael?
Michael: I am from Denmark. I have always been a techie, playing around with computers since I was very young. When I was 16, I started my first software company that would develop management software for clients. I did not know who my clients were exactly but I was just developing the software. I thought it would be great to control computers in internet cafés or restaurants. I was working part time in one of those places and that’s how the idea came about. That company (Smartlaunch) turned out to be quite successful and our product is used all over the world today in thousands of places and by millions of people, which is of course a great adventure!
I was always driven by the concept of creating something new. I would always have three or four different projects going on at the same time. Most of them would fail while some of them would work out! I created a bunch of different companies following the years I started out. My studies were in Mathematics, Finance and Strategic Management.
However at the same time I was always building start-ups. I once did a food delivery system in Copenhagen. I later worked with mobile apps on advertisements – basically a bunch of weird things that did not turn out to be anything big. I failed a lot, I can’t even remember some of them. Essentially I loved spotting out the problems in the world and trying to solve them. Being a techie turned out to be a great skill to have. It allowed me to sit down and code a solution. A couple of days later I would have a prototype of what I wanted to do. I went on exchange to the US as well and lived in Boston, New York and Chicago during my university days. I moved to Zurich to work as a management consultant in McKinsey after that.
I felt like I needed to do something more though! At that time our company was 8 or 9 years old. Suddenly one day, I decided to sell all my companies. I missed the feeling of creating something, the feeling of building something for users. Whenever you put a 100 hours into something you know that would come back to you in a different form. When you are consulting you talk about the strategies and you make slides – at some point I said I want to do all this stuff I am talking so much about.
A while later I decided to move to Bali and I played adventure sports here. And my urge to create companies came back. That’s what I have been doing for a couple of years now. I am working with a tech incubator here in Bali. We have a couple of villas here. A bunch of people have come down and we have built start-ups.
Rohan: What is your current start-up about?
Michael: We are working on 6 different start-ups right now. One of them is really exciting; it’s an e-mail application. It’s trying to enter the windows e-mail market by creating great looking themes, more friendly and intuitive design. I think that is missing from Windows. Somehow, the Mac/Apple market has won app makers who focus on the quality and design whereas the Windows apps makers focus on features and not on so much on design and quality. So we want to try and innovate that!
I think we have the right skill set to do that in our team. MailBird is our first app. It’s super simple and is very intuitive. It’s focused on you seeing your emails and keeping track of your social activities with the best experience. It was very much inspired by sparrow who did a great job on the Mac market. It was taken over by Google later for about 25 million dollars, I think. The Windows market in nine times as big as the apple market. So we aim for a huge opportunity there! We finally launched.
Michael: Yes definitely. Every year I am here I start to love it more and more! It is a super nice environment here and the cost of living is also very low. It creates a whole room for other opportunities and it helps my productivity tremendously. I personally don’t enjoy laundry, grocery shopping or cooking and we have managed to automate that process here. So it works really well!
So yes I will definitely stay here on the long-term. That does not mean I would not travel. I enjoy travelling and there are so many more places to explore. For a lot of projects that we are working on, we are building up the teams from Indonesia itself. Collaborating with the locals is a great approach. They are focused and artistic and great to work with.
We are working on a project similar to Mailbird. Then there’s Project Getaway where once a year, lots of entrepreneurs from all over the world come together, and live together for a month and work on their own companies. We are also working on a very exciting project called Start-up city.
We have a really cool concept of a start-up community here. We want to make that available to thousands of people. We are currently working on creating a huge locality, probably two or three soccer fields sized. We are building a small city there. People would be living and focusing on building companies. Primarily tech start-ups but any kind of start-up combined with access to local resources. We are also working on some entertainment games. We want to make education fun and engaging. It’s hard to compete with games like Warcraft. So what we do is bringing university and high school education to life. We have a bunch of high level universities partnering with us on this.
We are working on a lot of exciting projects. And I guess the main aim for us is to make it available to as many people as we can.
Rohan: What have been some of the defining moments here?
Michael:There have been many of them. I think having the experience of creating a start-up where you get users that appreciate your work is the best you can get. It’s amazing when you can see how the stuff you create make other users happy and makes them more productive or profitable. That experience in itself makes me focus my efforts on being an entrepreneur. That was one of the most defining moments. It keeps coming back to me whenever we built something and we talk to our users. Especially with Mailbird – they get their arms down and they go ‘its so cool’. I am not trying to sell it, it’s just a very cool experience. We obviously put tons and tons of hours into creating it. Getting the reward back is worth all of the effort. Even the money at that point is not the most important thing.
I started listening to audio books at a very early stage. I like to listen to them when I am driving or just instead of music. That is something I still do a lot around personal development. And it has changed my life in many ways. The personal development coaches have definitely helped a lot. I have a personal development coach and a business coach as well. I find them very useful.
I would try and connect with people who have done things in their life and that helps me improve mine. To this day I focus on learning new things and trying to develop my skills in any area. After a while it gave me a belief that there is nothing that we cant do. It opens up the whole world to you. If this is what I want to do, then I’ll figure out a way to do it. That really changes your whole perspective on life.
Consulting was a big defining moment. It was my first real job. It was a huge eye-opener. It helped to confirm that I needed to create something.
The last one has been coming here to Bali. The culture of the Balinese people especially – the way you can enjoy anything. It’s not about getting the biggest car and the biggest house. The way people live their life here, the way everything is simple and how everyone is friendly and smiling. That changes your perspective on life.
One more thing I would encourage people to do is to try and throw themselves into situations where they would be most uncomfortable. Whenever I get into an uncomfortable place, I go I shouldn’t do this – but that’s when I switch over and say I should do this. It has such a huge impact on you!
Rohan: What are some productivity hacks that you use?
Michael: The concept of productivity is huge for me. I studied math and optimization in School. So I am tuned to tweaking everything to the optimum. In general I read a lot about productivity and it is about finding the best thing that works for you. It’s very individual oriented. Do you talk with people or work on your own to focus? All those things define productivity. I spend 10-15 minutes every morning planning my day and deciding the items to work on for the day. I consider the purpose of those tasks. Not just what I am going to do but WHY I am doing it as well. Usually what I realized was that when I find the answer to why I do something, I find a much faster way to do it or an alternative way of doing it.
I believe in the 2-minute rule. Whenever I can solve a task (especially emails) that should take 2 minutes I do it immediately. By now there are so many things I just do automatically. I work in pomodoros. You decide what the goal at the end of 25 minutes is and work towards it. In the 5-10 minute break I usually think of what I did in the past 20-25 minutes and wonder what I could have done better.
Exercise helps me a lot. Just 5-10 minutes in the morning. We also train here with the others a couple of times week and that’s fun as well. Eating habits, reducing the amount of unhealthy food everything helps. We have staff here that serve us food 5 times day. I think that helps a lot too. It does not directly affect productivity but helps keep your mind fresh.
Rohan: What is your advice to different people who lead? What are thoughts on leadership that you would like to share?
Michael: When I started reading audio books I realized there was a lot about me me and me. At some point I decided to switch my goal from improving myself to helping others improve their lives. My mission became to inspire others. Obviously, I still wanted to get better but this expansion of circle helped me a lot. It helped me thinking about how other people work and learn. I put my emphasis on helping people if they want to of course. That ties to caring a lot about other people.
A favourite book, talks about 6 different styles of leadership styles. It’s not about one particular style. It’s more about being capable and adjusting to the right situations. It’s not about being that one person, its always about trying to fit into the problem and then capturing the situation. It’s about being in the moment, looking out for people and looking for the hidden signals. That ties with empathy as well. Emotional intelligence helps you get far!
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That interview was a lot of fun, Michael. Thanks so much for taking the time!
As far as Real Leaders goes, we are having a fun period of change ourselves. We have been thinking about why we are doing what we are doing and have found ourselves really excited at the thought that we’ve managed to survive an entire year! As a result, we are working on getting Realleaders.tv launched soon.
Lots more to follow. It’s going to get much better! Stay tuned.. and wish you all a great week.
The Real Leaders Team Dhanya, Eb and yours truly..
