Category: Everything else

Someone shared this TED talk on depression and anxiety by Johann Hari a few weeks ago.

I finally got to reading the transcript yesterday (I prefer reading transcripts to watching TED videos for some reason) and I thought his content was the kind that was both common sense and insightful.

There’s a lovely anecdote about a cow that explains his thesis.

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There was a farmer in their community who worked in the rice fields. And one day, he stood on a land mine left over from the war with the United States, and he got his leg blown off. So they him an artificial leg, and after a while, he went back to work in the rice fields.

But apparently, it’s super painful to work under water when you’ve got an artificial limb, and I’m guessing it was pretty traumatic to go back and work in the field where he got blown up. The guy started to cry all day, he refused to get out of bed, he developed all the symptoms of classic depression. The Cambodian doctor said, “This is when we gave him an antidepressant.”

And Dr. Summerfield said, “What was it?” They explained that they went and sat with him. They listened to him. They realized that his pain made sense — it was hard for him to see it in the throes of his depression, but actually, it had perfectly understandable causes in his life. One of the doctors, talking to the people in the community, figured, “You know, if we bought this guy a cow, he could become a dairy farmer, he wouldn’t be in this position that was screwing him up so much, he wouldn’t have to go and work in the rice fields.”

So they bought him a cow.

Within a couple of weeks, his crying stopped, within a month, his depression was gone. They said to doctor Summerfield, “So you see, doctor, that cow, that was an antidepressant, that’s what you mean, right?”

If you’d been raised to think about depression the way I was, and most of the people here were, that sounds like a bad joke, right? “I went to my doctor for an antidepressant, she gave me a cow.” But what those Cambodian doctors knew intuitively, based on this individual, unscientific anecdote, is what the leading medical body in the world, the World Health Organization, has been trying to tell us for years, based on the best scientific evidence.

If you’re depressed, if you’re anxious, you’re not weak, you’re not crazy, you’re not, in the main, a machine with broken parts. You’re a human being with unmet needs. And it’s just as important to think here about what those Cambodian doctors and the World Health Organization are not saying. They did not say to this farmer, “Hey, buddy, you need to pull yourself together. It’s your job to figure out and fix this problem on your own.” On the contrary, what they said is, “We’re here as a group to pull together with you, so together, we can figure out and fix this problem.” This is what every depressed person needs, and it’s what every depressed person deserves.

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He then goes on to discuss two key causes of depression and the solutions that emerge from them. They were loneliness and consumerism.

The solutions that emerge are investing time to find a group that exists for a purpose that is bigger than ourselves and figure out how we can find ways to focus more on things that enable us to move toward love, meaning, and connection.

Most importantly, he explains that depression and anxiety are signals. Their presence tells us something.

And, in his words – “We need to start listening to these signals, because they’re telling us something we really need to hear. It’s only when we truly listen to these signals, and we honor these signals and respect these signals, that we’re going to begin to see the liberating, nourishing, deeper solutions. The cows that are waiting all around us.”

Thanks to the 24×7 nature of many careers and the many devices around us, it is easy to walk into weekends with an endless list of things to do, read, or think about.

In the face of that, I wish you (and myself) time to stare out of the window this weekend.

Let’s make sure we give ourselves the permission to do that.

A friend recently shared how he thinks about interesting job opportunities similar to how he thinks about finding a parking spot.

As it is easy to get suckered into a zero-sum mindset, he chooses to view every interesting job opportunity that didn’t work out at this time as a parking spot that just got occupied.

There’s no good obsessing about spots that are taken. It just means it is time to drive around a bit more and find a new spot.

Who knows – it might even be better than the one we considered previously.

The analogy resonated.

“But I had good intentions” only counts for the first misstep.

If our good intentions don’t translate to good outcomes the second time, it is time to ignore said intentions and, instead, focus on the outcomes we want to drive.

Then, work backwards to the learning, actions, and intentions that will make those outcomes possible.

Effective responses to good product feedback from stakeholders that matter (key customers/power users/executives) tend to have two ingredients –

1. An acknowledgment of the pain they’re feeling. This indicates both an awareness of the problem and the willingness to take responsibility for it.

2. An ETA for a fix or an ETA for that ETA. When we add a date, we transform our words into a commitment for follow up again. In the absence of that date, all we’re left with are words.

And, as the Westerosi might say, “words are wind.” :-)

“I took a few writing courses in college. The extraordinary poet Marie Ponsot would talk about the crow sitting on your shoulder saying things like: “That sucks,” ”How could you write that?” and “Are you kidding me?”

Diminutive, chain-smoking Marie would jut her tobacco-stained finger into the air, punctuating every word: Shoot. The. Damn. Crow.” | Jerry Colonna

While that analogy may be a touch too violent for some, Marie Ponsot’s advice is poignant, powerful, and on point.

There are occasions when our inner critic helps us ship better work.

But, when we find those criticisms move from the realm of constructive feedback to the kind that results in inaction, the inner critic needs to be fired.

HT: Reboot by Jerry Colonna

A practice that helps with writing better memos/documents – get started as soon as you know you need to write one with a dump of ideas or questions you have in mind. Even a line or two counts.

This act turns out to be far more effective than waiting for the doc to appear fully formed in our heads because it triggers our ability to subconsciously process ideas.

Without realizing it, we work through these questions and ideas as we sleep, relax, commute, and stare into nothingness. Each time we get back to work on the doc with a few additions, the more subconscious processing we inspire.

This, in turn, enables us to get the cycles required to transform the doc from one that tells ourselves the story (our first version) to one that communicates the story in a way our intended audience understands it.

Subconscious processing is a powerful practice in our writing toolbox.

Busy parking lots tend to be a surprisingly powerful window into someone’s character.

The means they use to find a spot and the choices they make when no one they know is watching – e.g. sneaking in ahead of someone who has clearly been waiting – are telling.

In groups with reasonable folk working with aligned incentives, the biggest source of disagreement tends to be a lack of context.

Investing a bit of time upfront to share context – personal context early in the relationship and context about the situation and the problems being solved otherwise – saves hours and hours in time spent in disagreement otherwise.

Even with the best of intentions, it is hard for folks to meaningfully contribute without understanding the full picture.

And, we’re best served when we remind ourselves that we must go slow… to go fast.

For the most part, dreams we had as kids were simple.

It is unlikely our dreams involved anything along the lines of “being in the C-suite,” “having a high net worth,” or similar.

Instead, they were more likely about being a teacher or firefighter or doctor or being the kind of person that helped people. It may also have been about having a family, a dog, or a nice home.

And, even if we thought about wealth, it wasn’t as much about a number as much as it was about being able to do something with it – to travel or to spend on something we thought was a luxury.

Most of all, it was likely to be about the simple things that enabled us to be happy.

But, as we grow up, we often layer in all these specifics, keep taking in new bits of data based on what others around us have, and raise our expectations with each win along the way.

And, in doing so, we lose the plot.

We make it hard for reality to ever meet expectations. And, even when it does, we make sure we shift those expectation so those moments are fleeting. After all, there is no end to wanting the next thing. Or the next next thing for that matter.

From time to time, it is worth reminding ourselves of the simple dreams we had as children.

More often than not, it may surprise us as to how well we’ve done with respect to those dreams and just how much there is to be grateful for.