Author: alearningaday

“The way you think about pain is the way your life will turn out. Success is at the apex of the pain.” | Eliud Kipchoge

I watched a documentary about the Eliud Kipchoge’s “Ineos 1:59 challenge” where he showed that it was possible to finish a marathon within 2 hours. His excellence advanced predictions about human capability to achieve that mark by at least a couple of decades.

There were many parts of the documentary that were fascinating. It was inspiring to see his mental strength and his insanely high pain threshold. Eliud Kipchoge’s trademark response to pain when running a marathon is to smile. He radiated zen.

That, in turn, brought to mind this story from the 2021 Olympics.

Eliud Kipchoge was being held in a staging room during the 2021 Olympic Games in Tokyo. He and two other runners – Bashir Abdi from Belgium and Abdi Nageeye of the Netherlands – were waiting to receive their Olympic medals after the marathon race, which Kipchoge won for his second time.

Logistics of the awards ceremony meant the runners would have to wait for several hours in a cramped, dull, room with nothing to do but sit. Abdi and Negeeey later explained that they did what anyone else would do – they pulled out their cellphones, found a Wi-Fi network, and aimlessly scrolled social media.

Kipchoge didn’t.

Abdi and Negeeey said he just sat there, staring at the wall, in perfect silence and contentment.

For hours.

“He’s not human” – was Abdi’s assessment.

Well, he is. Just a very special one who developed focus and an incredibly high pain threshold by consistently doing things others weren’t/aren’t willing to do.

The word discipline is derived from the word disciple.

Discipline thus follows when we are a disciple to a philosophy, a set of principles/values, or an overriding purpose.

That is how we summon the will to subordinate what we want now to that greater cause or idea.

The arc of clarity bends toward simplicity.

“To be human is to confuse a satisfying story with a meaningful one, and to mistake life for something huge with two legs. No: life is mobilized on a vastly larger scale, and the world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.” | Richard Powers, The Overstory

Poignant and powerful.

Every time a team needs to make a hire, the need is urgent. Hires are made because some work urgently needs to get done. And that work nearly always fall on the rest of the team and the manager.

You can’t get a person in seat fast enough.

And yet, that’s when most hiring managers make the cardinal mistake. They settle. They over-weight the interviews or how good it looks on paper. They ignore a warning sign or don’t pressure test their assumptions with references. But their short-term pressure is alleviated.

Sometimes they get lucky, and the hire works out great. Often however, they find themselves dealing with one small problem after another for a sustained period of time.

Until the realization dawns that they made the wrong hire. They then come to that painful realization – the cost of the hire was significantly more than they thought.

And then the cycle repeats again.

It only stops when we internalize one truth – an open seat on the bus is always better than having the wrong person.

Never rush a hire.

We celebrated our 10 year anniversary in mid-2023. Ever since, I’ve been thinking about the biggest lessons I’ve learnt from our time together. I think these are the 3 biggest lessons I’ve learnt:

(1) You don’t have to have the last word. Attempting to “win” debates/arguments often results in us creating mountains out of molehills. Let molehills be. Let the small things stay the small things.

This has been a particularly hard lesson for me to learn. I can’t claim to have mastered it – my competitive instincts still occasionally get the better of me. But I’ve gotten better at it. I’m better this year than I was last year and orders of magnitude better than I was 10 years ago. I hope to continue to get better.

(2) Walk away when you are angry. When you’ve been together for most of your adult life (we dated for 6 years before we got married – so we’ve covered all of our adult life), you are going to have arguments. More so when you’re younger and more impulsive. And especially so when you are short of sleep or tired after a tough spell at work or, if you choose to have kids, for long stretches of time. ;-)

And these moments can often result in us saying things we don’t mean. Those words, in turn, cause damage that is often very hard to repair. Walk away when you are angry.

Of the 3 lessons, this the lesson I’d give myself the highest improvement grades.

(3) Give a lot more than you take – in a way that works for your partner. Stephen Covey encapsulated this idea in a lovely concept called “the emotional bank account.” Bad relationships have “overdrawn” accounts while great relationships always had a healthy – maybe close to infinite – balance. That happens when we give a LOT more than we take.

But that’s not all. People value different things. We read a great book when we got married titled “His Needs, Her Needs.” Gary Chapman has done work on love languages. All of these get at the same idea – don’t give what you want to receive. Give what your partner likes to receive.

Of the 3 lessons, this is the lesson where I have the most work to do. My wife outclasses me on giving a lot more than she takes. Competing with her excellence is futile. So I go back to doing what I do best – attempting to become a bit better every day.

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A wise executive once shared that she thought the most important decision most people make is deciding who to marry. I agree. I liken it to building a great team. When you have a great team, you complement each other, cover for each other, and are far better as a whole. When you have a bad team, the atmosphere is toxic and nothing meaningful gets done.

For those of us that choose to marry, our partners then become the first and most important team we build.

Choose well.

Then invest in making it great.

“I always want to say to people who want to be rich and famous: ‘try being rich first.’ See if that doesn’t cover most of it. There’s not much downside to being rich, other than paying taxes and having your relatives ask you for money. But when you become famous, you end up with a 24-hour job… The only good thing about fame is that I’ve gotten out of a couple of speeding tickets. I’ve gotten into a restaurant when I didn’t have a suit and tie on. That’s really about it.” | Bill Murray

Fame is an alluring target. But I’ve observed time and time again that best path toward a high quality of life is to be rich and anonymous.

The first thing to get clarity on is the why.

The next is the what.

Then comes the who, the when, and the how.

The order matters.

In functional organizations, leadership focuses on providing clarity on the why, sets the direction for the what, and ensures the right “who” is on the problem. The leads then align with the team on the magnitude of the what, the when, and leaves the how to the team.

Again, the order matters.

I spoke to my high school chemistry teacher recently and shared that I don’t remember what he taught anymore. But I sure remember how he taught.

He was a Chemistry genius and stand-up comedian rolled into one. His style was to walk in with just a few pieces of chalk and a duster – he remains the only teacher from school who never brought a textbook with him.

Attempting to control a group of 40 boys in high school in the middle of the day was a task few succeeded at. Everyone else who succeeded did so because they inspired fear. He, however, inspired respect. We wanted to be tuned in to what he had to say.

He’d often start his class with a joke. For example, he’d wonder aloud as to why there existed an industry for sleeping pills. “Just use chemistry textbooks. Guaranteed to help you fall asleep in 2 minutes. ”

Then he’d go on to hold our attention for the next 40 minutes and make Chemistry come alive. He’d interact with us, treat every question seriously, and bring in humor at every opportunity. He believes any teacher who comes into a classroom intent on teaching something has it all wrong. Every class is simply an opportunity to interact and learn – with the subject being the excuse.

It was a masterclass in teaching…. and leadership. I am so grateful to have witnessed it up close.

PS: For those of you who get these notes via email, a double post edition today thanks to a time-zone kerfuffle that accidentally delayed yesterday’s note.

A subtle change that wise leaders make is turning the focus of their humor to themselves as they grow in influence. This matters for two reasons –

(1) As you get more senior, it is easy to think your jokes have gotten funnier. In reality, people around you are just significantly more likely to laugh at your jokes.

(2) It is easy to forget just how impactful your words can be. I’ve been on the receiving end of humor that was well intentioned. But it got uncomfortable quickly. It makes a world of a difference when the focus of your humor is you. It helps create a culture where everyone understands it isn’t worth taking yourself too seriously around here.

A sense of humor is a powerful tool. It provides levity, adds perspective, and makes work a lot more fun.

As with all powerful tools, it needs to be used well.