Author: alearningaday

Whenever we take a shortcut, we incur a debt.

In time, that debt always comes due. Always. Regardless of which aspect of our life. It applies to health, to our relationships, to the products we ship, and the people we hire.

The answer isn’t to never incur a debt.

It is just important to be conscious and thoughtful about which debts we choose to incur and overall debt load we carry.

A lesson I’ve learnt from years of reflecting on my emotions every day is to not overweight emotions from any given day.

Put differently, don’t make irreversible/hard to reverse/expensive decisions based on a day’s worth of data. For such decisions – e.g., buying something expensive, committing to a time intensive project, getting married, hiring someone, having a kid, or quitting a job – there is little upside from making a hurried decision. Especially one made on the heels of a bad day.

We all have bad days. Some days are monumentally bad. But things often turn around quickly enough – sometimes on a dime and often faster than we expect.

If things don’t look up after a bit of time (say 2 weeks), it is worth asking the hard question. If things look stubbornly bad after a month, it might be time to make a decision.

The key is to take the emotion out of key decisions. For most of us, that helps get rid of enough noise so we can pay attention to our gut.

Rash or “rage” driven decisions rarely lead to good long term outcomes. And overweighting negative emotions on any given day is a recipe for rash decisions.

I was out on a run the other morning pondering a challenging situation from the previous day. I was feeling low on energy as I thought about the situation.

Until I paid attention to the sun.

As I saw the sun rise, I found myself wondering – how many such problems has the sun been witness to in its lifetime?

My challenges were immediately put into perspective.

Then, I thought about how the sun just shows up consistently every day. It is there – always present, always reliable.

I realized that is all I should aim to do – show up and be there. In time, the challenges will work themselves out.

And they did.

I started intermittent fasting in earnest in January 2020. I’ve reflected on it a few times. A few reflections as that run came to an end 2 weeks back –

(1) I started intermittent fasting (IF) at a time when I was feeling unfit. Our kids were 3 and 1.5 and survival ranked higher than self-care on my priority list. I had a non-existent exercise routine and, as I was regularly short on sleep, I felt conscious about the fact that I wasn’t consistently making the best diet choices.

I’d read about the benefits of fasting and the idea of restricting meals to an 8 hour window felt worth a shot.

(2) IF did two things for me right from the get-go. It gifted me 20 odd minutes back in the day that would otherwise have gone to breakfast. It reduced the guilt I felt about my health and helped me feel better about myself. Win and win.

(3) Down the line, I realized that the biggest gift I had from this period was about my comfort with hunger. It helped me realize that I had a lot of capacity to deal with hunger. There were days – especially during the COVID lockdowns or during a particularly long day of work – when I fasted for nearly the whole day. It was no big deal.

I realized I had gotten into a habit of eating when the time came and regardless of how hungry I was. IF reminded me of the importance of hunger and the joy of eating when you are hungry. I think this idea had implications in my life that went well beyond food.

(4) I began wondering about whether IF was a prudent choice in the past months. As our kids have gotten older (life gets a lot better after the youngest turns 3), I have been getting back to a more consistent fitness regime. And as I’ve dialed up both the length and intensity of the morning workout, I wasn’t sure how well fasting played with this.

(5) I finally gave up on IF as one of the changes after reading Outlive. Peter Attia broke down diet control into 3 kinds – (1) Diet restricted (e.g., keto or low carb), (2) Calorie restricted (i.e., breaking down everything on your plate into calories – as athletes do), or (3) Time restricted (i.e., intermittent fasting). While each of these can help people reduce weight, he explained that he noticed that patients who were exercising were losing more protein with this approach.

He also shared some compelling data about protein loss as we age and the importance of ensuring we’re getting the protein we need.

That resonated with me. It was the source of the unease I was beginning to feel as I dialed up my workouts. And while I’m sure there are IF experts who will have found ways to make this work – e.g., by skipping dinner instead of breakfast – I’ve realized from my experiments that it doesn’t work for me.

So, I’ve substituted my missed breakfast meal with a protein shake with whey protein, spinach, and frozen berries. It works great – while more work than skipping breakfast, it still keeps things simple enough.

Overall, IF was a positive experience. It was a habit that helped me during a season of my life when I needed it. And, even as I bid goodbye to that habit, I’ve taken away lessons about simplicity and hunger that will stay with me.

The most efficient means of learning is to learn from others’ mistakes.

This is easier said than done. It is easy to hear or read about someone’s mistakes. To truly learn from them, we have to internalize their pain and think about how we might apply what they learnt when we’re in a similar situation.

The trick is in empathizing so strongly with their pain that we reflect on it as if it were ours.

Then, when the situation presents itself, we stand a chance of changing our behavior and, thus, learning.

“Generally, say less than necessary.” | Kevin Kelly

Much to learn here, I have

Good leadership is when we define the why and the what and trust the team to figure out the how.

We exhibit bad leadership when we attempt to control (a.k.a micromanage) the how instead of focusing on hiring a team we can trust, giving them the right context and boundaries, and getting out of the way.

I started working as a product manager a few years back. Someone said – “In the long run, the only thing that’s going to matter is your answer to the question – what have you shipped?

If you can point to a good set of products that have been loved by users and delivered on value to the business, you’ll have done well. And if you can’t, then you’ll have done poorly. It’s a simple as that.”

I think of that note from time to time. When you’re in the process of building the product, it becomes easy to get caught in the internal noise. Your doubts, the team’s feelings, internal momentum, stakeholder feedback, user research, and so on. Some of these may be predictive to the outcome. The key is to not be distracted by any of this and instead to focus on the product.

Ultimately, the product truth will emerge and shine through.. or not.

Everything else is gravy.

“Those who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.” | Kathrin Jansen

I came across this quote in Seth Godin’s latest book – “The Song of Significance.”

I bookmarked this quote as it felt like quintessential Seth – constructive, forward-looking, and action-oriented.

It resonated.

The biggest challenge with unpacking a breakdown in a relationship or any complex system is that we’re stuck analyzing what happened in the immediate past when the seeds were likely planted many months or even years prior.