Author: alearningaday

Observation: The quality of our workout today is directly proportional to the quality of our sleep last night.

Making peace with what is gives us a higher chance of shaping what could be.

I sometimes joke that one way to look good as a product manager in any tough conversation – with cross-functional partners and/or other teams – is to say – “let’s take a step back and align on the problem statement.”

It is a joke because you definitely don’t want to overuse it.

But it is amazing how often the act of aligning on the problem untangles the messiest of knots.

I’ve been making slow progress through Poor Charlie’s Almanack – a compilation of Charlie Munger’s wisdom.

I was struck by a few of the notes in a page today with some Q&A.

“What should a young person look for in a career?”

“I have three basic rules. Meeting all three is nearly impossible, but you should try anyway:

• Don’t sell anything you wouldn’t buy yourself
• Don’t work for anyone you don’t respect and admire.
• Work only with people you enjoy.”

“What overall life advice do you have for young people?”

“Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up. Discharge your duties faithfully and well. Step-by-step you get ahead, but not necessarily in fast spurts. But you build discipline by preparing for fast spurts. Slug it out one inch at a time, day-by-day, and at the end of the day – if you live long enough – like most people, you will get out of life what you deserve.

Life and its various passages can be hard, brutally hard. The three things I have found helpful in coping with its challenges are:

• Have low expectations.
• Have a sense of humor.
• Surround yourself with the love of friend and family.

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I love the simple three-point answers to both questions. They’re pithy, thoughtful, and pack a punch.

That ability to keep it simple while being insightful is a mark of wisdom.

Manchester United Football Club are having another shambolic start to a new season. After hundreds of millions of dollars spent over the summer (following hundreds of millions in the last few), the team still looks disoriented and disorganized.

Or at least that’s what the scoreline and the summary of the text commentary said.

I don’t think I’d have watched even if I had the option.

The manager, Erik Ten Hag, has shown himself to be proficient at making excuses for over 15 months now. When the club’s operations were taken over by new owners, they expressed their doubts about ETH. Somehow, against all odds, they overcame their doubts, believed his side of the story, and retained him.

It reminds me of Frank Slootman’s fantastic quote “when there’s a doubt, there’s no doubt.”

The entire excerpt from his book “Amp It Up” was insightful – “Years ago, I used to hesitate and wait situations out, often trying to fix underperforming people or products instead of pulling the plug. Back then I was seen as a much more reasonable and thoughtful leader — but that didn’t mean I was right. As I got more experience, I realized that I was often just wasting everybody’s time. If we knew that something or someone wasn’t working, why wait? As the saying goes, when there is doubt, there is no doubt.” 

“Back then I was seen as a much more reasonable and thoughtful leader – but that didn’t mean I was right.”

I’ve thought about those words a lot since I read his book 2 years ago. I think of it when I see Erik Ten Hag and Manchester United. I think of it every time I see organizational dysfunction caused by senior leaders.

When there’s a doubt, there’s no doubt.

Om Malik – one of tech’s “OG” journalist voices – shared a beautiful post on his blog today. He reflected on a brutal review he shared about an app called “Path” that, in his words, was critical, harsh, and unkind.

He shared – “I don’t have regrets because I failed to do my job or wasn’t honest. I have regrets because I forgot that the English language allows us to make points with elegance and eloquence. How could I, as a practitioner of the bard’s language, forget its original tenet? I regret using the words I did because they minimized the efforts of individuals who dreamed up something new.

I look back and often think perhaps I should have approached my work with empathy, carefully chosen words and a measured tone. While our culture often encourages harsh takedowns, we should consider the impact of our words.“

He reflected on this as he commented on the brouhaha surrounding Marques Brownlee’s new app. Marques Brownlee – a.k.a. MKBHD – is one of the most influential tech review YouTubers on the planet. His reviews have had the ability to destroy new products and companies. Marques shipped a product of his own recently – likely in a move to leverage his brand and diversify revenue streams.

However, the product – a wallpaper app that charged $50 per year – released to harsh criticism about both the product and its pricing. It just didn’t work.

Om shared – “However, the fracas around Panels should serve as a learning opportunity, not only for Brownlee but also for those who review products and offer opinions. It reminds us that creating something new requires effort, courage and dedication.

Putting oneself out there inevitably invites criticism and feedback. This situation serves as a reminder for both creators and critics to approach their work thoughtfully, balancing honesty with kindness and keeping the audience’s needs at the forefront.“

It is a powerful reflection and one that resonated a lot.

Here’s why – I’ve been building technology products as a Product Manager for a few years now. Before I started working in product management, I spent a lot of time reviewing products and simulating prioritization decisions. It was my way of learning what I hoped would be my craft.

But the more time I spent attempting to build products, the more I came to appreciate the nuance and challenges involved. Things that felt like obvious fixes to a user turned out to involve challenging technical and organizational trade-offs. There were frustrating user experiences that seemed trivial to fix from the outside. But, having spent time with the constraints, I knew just how challenging this was.

This is not an excuse for the mistakes I’ve made and continue to make as I build products. It is recognition of a simple truth – building good things is hard. Tearing down them and criticizing them with smart comments and wit is easy.

I don’t expect every user to understand this. I’ve been on the receiving end of many harshly worded complaints and frustrations. I get it – job seeker is a painful experience. It is annoying and the user believes we should be doing better. And we have a lot of space to do better – without question.

However, thanks to this experience, I have built more empathy for anyone attempting to build something. I am learning that I need to do my best to summon that empathy and choose my words more carefully.

Especially when I don’t know or understand what constraints they’re working with.

The story of the Green Revolution can be traced back to the synthesis of Ammonia by the Haber Bosch process. This is because it became clear to anyone who studied land productivity that we needed a way to bring back Nitrogen into the soil. Ammonia turned out to be the answer.

Synthesizing Ammonia, however, required a breakthrough. While this is often ascribed to two geniuses, Haber and Bosch, the truth was far from that.

While Haber provided the initial insight, Bosch and a large team of scientists at BASF synthesized ammonia after relentless iterative experimentation. The result was a process that enabled us to all benefit from cheap fertilizer that was crucial to ensure that soil remain productive for farmers.

The result wasn’t just profits. This laid the foundations for victory in a fight against famine and starvation. It was expected that countries like India and Pakistan would see hundreds of thousands of death due to starvation in the 1970s.

However, thanks to Ammonia-based fertilizers and disease resistant wheat varieties created by Norman Borlaug, the green revolution came to be.

In hindsight, it is also fascinating that there was a lot of resistance in India and Pakistan to this innovation. Opposition arguments warned about all sorts of societal problems if it worked or if it didn’t.

Thanks to fertilizer and the “dwarf wheat” varieties, India ended up becoming an exporter.

3 reflections:

(1) As I read Matt Ridley’s “How Innovation Works”, it is clear just how repetitive the pattern of innovation is. While one or two people get the credit, it took an army to go from insight to mass adoption.

(2) Even the most obvious innovations face opposition.

(3) Innovations build on each other and produce a compound effect. The Green revolution wouldn’t have been possible if it wasn’t for the synthesis of Ammonia. Compounding is the most powerful force in the world.

Often, the most important step we take toward solving difficult problems is reminding ourselves that there is no silver bullet.

We have to do the work and get there – the old fashioned way.

One of the toughest challenges when calibrating talent in my experience is unconsciously weighing like-ability more than judgment.

Some thoughts on what we pursue.

Once we’re fortunate to have our essentials taken care of (security, food, shelter), we begin a journey in the pursuit of wealth.

The wealth we ultimately seek is the ability to have a rich life filled with great memories and quality time.

However, a rich life, like success and happiness, is an outcome that cannot be pursued. It ensues when we earn the right combination of inputs.

We can pursue two kinds of input wealth –

(a) External wealth (this is easily visible): Financial or status.
External wealth is a necessity. Financial wealth tends to be less fickle than status wealth.

(b) Internal wealth (this is visible only to self/close relationships): Physical (fitness), mental (equanimity), emotional (relationships/love), and spiritual (purpose).
Internal wealth, in the long run, often shows up in the amount of external wealth we have. Often but not always.

The challenge, in any given season of our life, is choosing which inputs to focus on and in what order.