The best leading indicator to good judgment is the desire to see things as they are versus how we want them to be.
Our ability to do so follows this desire. And, just as we can only design airplanes once we understand how the atmosphere really works, we can only shape reality once we understand it.
When we say “I am really bad at that,” what we are really saying is that it isn’t worth our effort to get better at it.
It is perfectly acceptable to decide it isn’t worth investing in a certain skill or habit. It may not be the best use of our limited time.
But, it isn’t right to pretend we aren’t capable of getting better. That’s just a way to let ourselves off the hook. And, while it might seem perfectly harmless to let ourselves off the hook on something trivial, it spirals quickly into skills and habits that aren’t so.
We can get better at anything we want to get better at. And, the first step to doing so is by fixing language that allows us to let ourselves off the hook.
The research on great teams has concluded that the key ingredient is psychological safety. That, to me, is just another word for trust. Great relationships and great teams are built on trust. If you’ve ever worked in a team which operated with 100% trust, you know what such experiences are like. They are a thing of beauty and are experiences you’ll cherish forever.
It turns out that there are no shortcuts for trust. Trust is predicated on knowledge and then understanding. We can claim to know someone when we know who they are and what their story is. We begin to understand them when we begin to understand how they make decisions and why they do what they do.
Building diverse teams, as a result, requires this investment. It needs to begin by taking the team out for a day or two and spending time understanding each other’s stories. No devices, no distractions, 100% presence. It is only after such a day that we can begin to understand how and why people operate the way they do. We hear stories we’ve never heard and find ourselves opening up to perspective that we’d never have considered. Only then are we ready to get work done. We have to go slow to go fast.
This sounds like a painfully intentional approach to building diverse teams. It is. Diverse teams are rarely built by accident. When that happens, it happens because the team members are stuck in the trenches – in very difficult situation that requires them to go through the same process under stress. Such situations often creates friends for life. The process of building and operating in a great teams isn’t different.
This process also speaks to why we naturally gravitate to building teams with people who are similar to us. It is easy to understand people who are similar to us. They share similar back stories, similar backgrounds and the process of understanding takes little effort. But, in my limited experience, such teams are the equivalent of getting five guitarists together. You may have a great jam session.
But, you rarely build a great band.
And, you never have a shot at being a part of an orchestra.
Productive intent is a pre-requisite for a good conversation. Polished and thoughtful delivery definitely help – but, they’re secondary. People listen for intent before they listen to the words.
That is why the most productive conversations typically involve people who trust each other.
In the absence of deep trust, there are only two other routes to productive conversations. The first is to build a reputation for having good intent and to lean on it. And, the second is to signal intent early. Start with appreciation and the why behind your feedback before you give your feedback.
Intent is what people remember when they’ve long forgotten the words.
I’ve been mulling a passage from Josh Waitzkin’s Art of Learning and thought I’d share it in full.
In every discipline, the ability to be clearheaded, present, cool under fire is much of what separates the best from the mediocre. In competition, the dynamic is often painfully transparent. If one player is serenely present while the other is clearly being ripped apart by internal issues, the outcome is already clear. The prey is no longer objective, makes compounding mistakes, and the predator moves in for the kill.
While more subtle, this issue is perhaps even more critical in solitary pursuits like writing, painting, scholarly thinking or learning. In the absence of continual external reinforcement, we must be our own monitor, and quality of presence is often the best gauge. We cannot expect to touch excellence if “going through the motions” is the norm of our lives. On the other hand, if deep, fluid presence becomes second nature, then, life, art and learning take on a richness that will continually surprise and delight. Those who excel are those who maximize each moment’s creative potential – for these masters of living, presence to the day-to-day learning process is akin to the purity of focus others dream of achieving in rare climactic moments where everything is on the line.
The secret is that everything is always on the line. The more present we are at practice, the more present we will be in competition, in the boardroom, at the exam, the operating table, the big stage. If we have any hope of attaining excellence, let alone showing what we’ve got under pressure, we have to be prepared by a lifestyle of reinforcement. Presence must be like breathing.
“The secret is that everything is always on the line” resonates deeply.
I thought this passage was both true and profound. Thanks Josh.
It is natural to work hard to avoid one or more among bad workplaces, poor work experiences and incompetent managers. And we should. But, it is also hard to overstate their value in the long run when we do find ways to overcome them when they happen.
Spend a bit of time reflecting on your painful experience and you walk away with perspective that will stay with you for the rest of your life. It is very hard to appreciate what is really bad if your experience of work only involves fancy office spaces, free food, projects that involve smart colleagues and hyper growth, and thoughtful managers.
However, if you’ve worked in a mind numbing data entry job, dealt with a manager who never failed to make you feel insecure or cleaned toilets at a restaurant for three months, it makes it a lot easier to appreciate what you have.
I don’t think the takeaway is to go seeking bad career experiences. But, I do think there is value in seeking varied experiences in our careers – especially in the early days. One of the biggest benefits of doing so is that some of those varied experiences will turn out to be bad.
And, while great workplaces typically help build great careers, bad experiences can give us the sort of perspective that can help us build happier lives.
PS: If all you have experienced is a great work environment, this is just a reminder to work extra hard to be conscious of all the privilege and be grateful.
Job descriptions frequently cite interpersonal skills – or variants like the ability to influence cross-functional stakeholders – as a required or preferred qualification. While intrapersonal skills get the occasional mention (“self starter” or some equivalent), they don’t seem to ever make it up to the list of top 3 skills required.
What are intrapersonal skills and how do they differ from interpersonal skills? While interpersonal skills deal with the communication between two people, intrapersonal skills are about the communication we have with ourselves. They deal with our mindset, our approach to analysis and learning, and our response to situations.
We’ve likely had plenty of training on interpersonal skills. But, when it comes to intrapersonal skills, we are, for the most part, on our own. And, that’s a big miss because it is in our interest to focus first and foremost on our intrapersonal skills.
Interpersonal and intrapersonal skills are analogous to personality and character. There’s a saying that personality opens doors while character keeps doors open. That’s just one way of saying that the best long term indicator of your ability to build trustworthy relationships is your character.
Or, put another way, your interpersonal ability is only as good as your intrapersonal ability in the long run.
Oxford university scientists expect us to live to be 100+ with many routinely expected to reach 150 years. Working life will, thus, last well into 70s, 80s and even past 100. How might we approach a career if we knew it was going to last 100 years?
Here are six ideas –
Of course, these ideas apply just as nicely to any career. Maybe we should adopt them regardless?
‘Nature is quantum, goddamn it! So if we want to simulate it, we need a quantum computer.’
Those words from Richard Feynman’s keynote in the “First Conference on the Physics of Computation” was what researchers in the then nascent field of quantum computing needed to hear. It gave the field the boost that it needed to begin a multi-decade long search for the first working quantum computer.
Classical computing. In 1948, MIT Professor Claude Shannon published a landmark paper — “A Mathematical Theory of Communication.” In this paper, he laid out the basic elements of communication (transmitter, channel, receiver, etc.) and popularized the term “bit” as a unit of information.
The bit remains the building block of the computers and phones that we use today. And, thanks to Shannon’s model and breakthroughs from numerous other researchers, we were able to use computers to solve many hitherto unsolved problems.
However, there classical computers cannot tackle very complex problems because it would require insane amounts of computation. For example, cryptography relies on the fact that no classical computer can break a large number into its various prime factors (e.g. 15 has 2 prime factors — 3 and 5) easily. A 232 digit large number took scientists two years to factor using hundreds of classical computers.
So, why can quantum computers do more? Super position and Entanglement. Classical computers encode and manipulate information as strings of binary digits — 1 or 0. Quantum bits, on the other hand, can exist in a superposition of the states 1 and 0. This means that a qubit’s state could be 1 or 0 with some probability.
Next, to perform computation, these qubits must exist in an interdependent state where changing the behavior of one can affect the other — this is called entanglement. This means that operations on qubits count more than on simple bits. While computational resources increase linearly as we increase the number of bits on classical computers, they increase exponentially on quantum computers. So, adding an additional qubit roughly doubles the computation power => a 50 qubit computer has 2⁵⁰ computational power than 1 qubit computer.
Error rate. The challenge, however, is error rate. Random fluctuations, from extra heat in qubits for example, can change the state of a qubit and derail the calculation. So, quantum computing can only live up to its potential if all the qubits work “in coherence.”
This is a problem because a high error rate takes away any benefits of using a quantum computer.
(Source and thanks: Quanta Magazine)
Reasons for optimism and pessimism. 2017 was a year that brought reasons for optimism with it. IBM announced that they had created a 50 qubit quantum computer. Google and Microsoft have also been investing heavily. In addition, IBM has made a 5 qubit computer available to researchers since 2016 for free.
(Source and thanks to: Technology Review)
While all this is good, there hasn’t yet emerged a solution to get around the error rate. While some researchers believe error rates will be the reason quantum computers will never make it to the mainstream, researchers around the world are working hard on the problem. Some believe the solution will be finding a way to work with the noise rather than to eliminate it. Could there, for example, be quantum algorithms that will enable us to generate results despite the noise? There is no guarantee we’ll find a solution however.
The next hairy question is which problems will quantum computers help us solve. While there’s a debate here, it is clear it won’t be a cure all for all sorts of problems. Besides if a quantum computer’s error rate is hard to predict and if its calculations can’t be checked, how can we conclude that the problem is solved right?
We have more questions than answers at this point.
Where does all this leave us? I really struggled with putting this post together. I postponed writing it for 2 straight weeks despite reading and watching the articles and video below at least a couple of times because I wasn’t sure I understood it well enough to write about it. I finally decided I’d ship my draft today no matter what.
That, in some ways, gets to the challenge with quantum computing. It is hard to understand how it works, why it is better and, thus, what it could do.
My layman’s synthesis, then, is as follows –
It feels like we’re still a couple of decades away from quantum computers hitting the mainstream. But, making such predictions on technology I barely understand is likely foolhardy anyway.
So, I’ll end with a note on the topic. All my reading led me to the conclusion that the way to think about the outlook on quantum computing is simply to think of it as a superposition of optimism and pessimism. :)
Links for additional reading
Writing about entrepreneurship often defaults to featuring entrepreneurs as adventurous risk takers. And, generally, it focuses either on the world famous list of college drop outs (Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, etc.) or Elon Musk (who is in a category of his own). This is both lazy and misguided because it misunderstands the relationship between financial risk and entrepreneurship.
None of the above folks took significant downside financial risk when they started their companies.
Brin, Gates, Page and Zuckerberg were drop outs from Stanford, Harvard, Stanfard and Harvard. They could have gone back to their prestigious schools if their companies didn’t work out. And, in the worst case, they would have ended their careers with tens of millions of dollars given they were setting out as programmers in an age that valued that skill.
Elon Musk didn’t set out to start SpaceX when he immigrated to the US. He struck gold with Zip2 first. His appetite to put his reputation on the line is commendable – but, let’s not confuse that with financial risk. He could lose all his money and make millions writing books and speaking if he ever wanted to. That he doesn’t is wonderful. But, let’s not pretend he’d be living on the streets otherwise.
In his book, Originals, Adam Grant has a good section on the real relationship between entrepreneurs and financial risk in a study of Warby Parker. As Warby Parker’s founders demonstrate, entrepreneurs actually need to masters of de-risking their venture. That’s why the best are obsessive about testing, rapidly iterating and finding product-market fit.
It is easy to see this in action when you are in any entrepreneurial hot-bed. Entrepreneurs rarely go out and put their savings on the line. Instead, they build a prototype on the side, attract enough venture capital interest and THEN quit their jobs to build a company. The existence of venture capital and (relatively) easy financing is key to entrepreneurial ecosystems. And, I’d argue that it is the sheer density of financing options in the Bay Area that ensures entrepreneurial minds, on average, find their way here and not the other way around. Regardless of causality, one wouldn’t exist without the other.
Finally, we generally discount the importance of privilege in the role of success. In all of the above cases and in most such stories, these entrepreneurs were based out of the United States – and often into families that had the capacity to help them if things went south. Family wealth aside, the right zip code is the biggest source of privilege on the planet. The best zip codes make it easy to build companies with plentiful access of capital and view failure as experience for the next attempt at building a successful venture.
What does all this mean? I think there are two lessons here. The first is to be dig deeper into stories that talk about entrepreneurs taking on heroic levels of financial risk. That’s not to say there won’t be exceptions. Instead, you’ll find that the exceptions prove the rule.
And, second, pay attention to conventional advice. Get to the best zip code possible, earn good educational credentials and work yourself into a position of privilege. The seeming risks that you take from a position of privilege won’t be risks at all.
A Learning a Day 