There’s a lesson you learn when you assemble furniture – brute force is rarely the answer to your problem.
When it goes well, things seamlessly slot into the right place. If you’re finding yourself using brute force, there’s likely something you did wrong. So, more often than not, we’re better off retracing our steps and avoiding unintentional damage.
It is a learning that is applicable well beyond furniture assembly.
Periodic reminder to self – the goal isn’t to avoid mistakes. It is to avoid repeating the same mistakes.
If we’re trying different things and stretching ourselves, new mistakes and those embarrassing falls/stumbles are inevitable.
So, instead of spending time reviewing that dreaded highlight reel of all of our mistakes as we wrap up the week, here’s to celebrating the new mistakes (and the accompanying learning). :-)
Failure, after all, isn’t in the falling down. It is in the staying down.
The Atlantic featured an interesting article from Paul Bloom recently about what having kids does to a parent’s happiness. Here’s the TLDR:
(1) On average across multiple studies, parents reported a decrease in happiness and marital satisfaction.
(2) This happiness decrease is uneven however. It depends on how old you are, whether you are a mother or father, and where you live. Countries with good child-care policies have significantly higher scores relative to countries that don’t (the US reports the largest drops). Mothers report a steeper drop than young fathers.
(3) But, despite all this, parents still describe parenthood as “the best thing they’ve ever done.” There are two explanations. The first is memory distortion – we forget the pain and remember the peaks and ends. Another is attachment.
(4) “This relates to a second point, which is that there’s more to life than happiness. When I say that raising my sons is the best thing I’ve ever done, I’m not saying that they gave me pleasure in any simple day-to-day sense, and I’m not saying that they were good for my marriage. I’m talking about something deeper, having to do with satisfaction, purpose, and meaning.”
(5) “The writer Zadie Smith puts it better than I ever could, describing having a child as a “strange admixture of terror, pain, and delight.” Smith, echoing the thoughts of everyone else who has seriously considered these issues, points out the risk of close attachments: “Isn’t it bad enough that the beloved, with whom you have experienced genuine joy, will eventually be lost to you? Why add to this nightmare the child, whose loss, if it ever happened, would mean nothing less than your total annihilation?” But this annihilation reflects the extraordinary value of such attachments; as the author Julian Barnes writes of grief, quoting a friend, “It hurts just as much as it is worth.””
The sub title of the piece did a great job laying the stage for these takeaways – “Research has found that having children is terrible for quality of life—but the truth about what parenthood means for happiness is a lot more complicated.”
It resonated.
I was at a celebrated winery recently where they explained their approach to making wine. I knew little about making wine. So, it was all new.
One idea that I found fascinating was that they refused to irrigate their plants. The grapes are planted on a hill with limestone 10-15 feet below the ground. Limestone is known for holding moisture. So, the roots need to make it to the limestone and get the moisture directly from the limestone.
Our guide explained that this lack of irrigation defines their wine’s taste and character. The harder the plants have to work, the more resilient they become. And the more resilient they become, the more likely they create strong wine.
Much like how we our character gets shaped too.
Every once a while, it is worth reminding ourselves that the correlation between what is popular and what is good is loose – at best.
A friend once described Halloween as similar to an American version of Diwali.
Growing up, Diwali was the most fun festival of them all. Diwali meant fireworks, well-lit homes, hanging out with our neighbors, and sharing sweets.
We celebrated our first real Halloween yesterday as our kids are now old enough to both understand and be excited about “trick or treat.” We ended up joining a group of kids and parents from around our new neighborhood who were doing the same, walking up to decorated homes, and saying hi to all the neighbors who gave our kids candy.
Absent the fireworks, it did remind me of Diwali growing up.
I’ve spent nearly as many years away from India as I have growing up. And, in all these years spent across various continents, I’ve always stumbled upon similar traditions – with no exceptions.
Lost in all the conversation, political discourse, and (typically) rhetoric about our differences is the fact that we’re all human. And, no matter the color of our passport or our skin, we all crave love, safety, and belonging.
So, it is no surprise that there are similar traditions wherever there are humans.
Ubuntu.
I am because we are.
“Sorry is what people say when they want permission to stop feeling bad.”
I heard this quote on “The Morning Show” recently. It made me pause.
There are apologies that fail the moment you hear them. These fail because they sound insincere.
Then there are others that sound heartfelt. But, they could still sound empty if they don’t result in change. It’s those empty apologies that this idea captures.
It got me reflecting about the times I’ve said sorry of late. Did I say it because I wanted permission to stop feeling bad?
It is a powerful question.
I hope to eliminate that brand of sorry from my life.
We bought a home recently (a story for another day) and have been attempting to touch up a few spots around the home. These spots are spread across multiple rooms – each painted with slightly different variations of the main color.
We heard Home Depot’s paint department had the capability (courtesy of Behr) to do a “color match.” All you need to do is take a bit of the wall, have a machine scan the color, and you will know what shade it was painted.
It sounded perfect.
5 attempts later, we’ve realized that color match doesn’t work. It would have been more effective to just pick a new color and paint these walls.
So, that’s what we’re doing now.
Lessons in painting a home aside, it is a great reminder of the fact that it is sometimes easier to start over on a project rather than attempt to paper over existing cracks.
Our default state is to pay disproportionate attention to our mistakes and carry them (and all the associate embarrassment and disappointment) with us for long periods of time.
As a result, we end up having a long memory for mistakes and a short memory for the learning that came from it.
This turns out to be to counter productive. We learn best when we have a short memory for mistakes and a long memory for the learning.
Let the embarrassment and disappointment go.
Let the learning stay.
I shared a post earlier today on LinkedIn sharing some of the features our team has been working on to help jobseekers find remote and hybrid opportunities.
This was a fascinating project because it is a fascinating time for anyone interested in understanding the future of work. Here’s the short form version.
Many are taking a pause to re-think how and why they work, and are pursuing roles based on what they really want out of a job, like more flexibility. We’ve been hard at work to help people discover opportunities that match their on-site, hybrid and remote work preferences on LinkedIn. Here are 3 fascinating bits of early data:
(1) Of all job searches utilizing the new on-site/hybrid/remote filters, 65% are for remote jobs
(2) Of new job postings featuring these workplace policies, 1 in 4 are remote (!).
(3) Of companies who have updated their Company Page with these policies so far, we’re seeing 45% list they are hybrid, 32% remote and 23% onsite.
We hope these features helps when you look for your next opportunity.
Much gratitude to the wonderful 100+ person team that came together to make this happen.
Every time I see the stats on remote, I’m reminded of just how much impact COVID-19 has had on the world. All our long-held assumptions about the need to show up at an office everyday to get work done have been overturned.
“The times they are a changin.”
A Learning a Day 