Category: Everything else

Imagine sitting at a magical dinner table that only existed to feed us more of what we like. If we take a morsel of our favorite sweet treat, the next morsel would be a similar or sweeter treat.

If we don’t keep tabs on our health often enough, it may be a while before we realize that this isn’t a viable strategy to keep good health. But, once we do, there are a few questions we’d need to ask. For example –

What is the best way to take what I need from the table, walk away and eat elsewhere?
How do I keep away from the short term temptation that does little good in the long term? 
How can I cook more and bring my own healthy food to the table? 

The internet content machine works similar to the magical dinner table.

And, it is on us to ask ourselves these questions.

A Manchester United soccer team assembled with players worth a billion dollars surrendered meekly to a team whose squad cost a third in a two legged European Cup game yesterday. It was a two legged game that illustrated the power of mindset.

Right from the first leg in Sevilla, the Manchester United manager, Jose Mourinho, set up the team to avoid defeat. The players seemed instructed to pass the ball sideways and take no risks. He approached the game like a Little League club might approach the game against the world champions.

If you’ve watched or followed soccer long enough, you know that the best strategy for a team with great players is to simply go out and play attacking football. Sure, they may concede a goal or two. But, you’d back them to score more than they concede often enough. When you force a “take no risks” strategy onto attack minded players, you paralyze them. Eventually, when the opposition does score that dreaded goal, it takes too long to overcome the inertia and fight back.

In that sense, a risk-free strategy is actually the most risky of them all.

Such (pathetic) defeats are a reminder of the power of mindset. You may have access to the best resources on a day-to-day basis. But, if your mindset isn’t any good, your results won’t be either.

A lot of the literature around goal (and system) setting focuses on the act of commitment. We might make the commitment on a special day (read: new years), break it down to actionable components or a habit by using systems thinking, share it with friends or an accountability group, and so on.

While all of the above matters, I’ve observed that the biggest leading indicator to a goal’s success is our commitment to re-commit to it as often as possible.

We don’t acquire worthwhile habits or goals because we made a commitment. We achieve them because, in doing so, we commit to re-commit until we make them happen.

The takeaway for us, then, should be to be thoughtful and intentional about the re-commitment plan for any goal or system we commit to. A good re-commitment plan consists of frequent checkpoints – these could be weekly or even daily depending on importance. It doesn’t require anything fancy – a simple question at the end of our daily to do list to spark reflection works. The important thing is to surround ourselves with reminders.

There is nothing as important as the act of re-committing because stumbling and falling as we pursue goals or meaningful habits are inevitable.

And, recommitting is the equivalent of the quiet voice that reminds us that failure is not the falling down, it is the staying down.

During the first couple of years of writing this blog, I used to habitually “save good ideas for tomorrow.” I didn’t believe I had many good ideas – so, I thought saving good ones for later made sense. For someone who had committed to sharing a learning every day, my mindset was remarkably fixed.

Of course, this isn’t how idea generation works. Good ideas are just a function of the number of bad ideas you have. The more bad ideas you generate, the more likely it is that you will find a good idea. You just have to commit to paying attention to the process of cultivation of ideas and take them all, good and bad, down. You’ll learn to filter based on your needs.

Ideas, optimism, complements, goodwill, affection, care – we don’t have limited stock of any of these wonderful things.

The more we use and cultivate them, the more and better there will be.

And, we can start today.

“We’re replacing your quarterly bonus of ~$350 with a lottery.

The prizes are exciting. There are 1300 prizes with the grand prize at $100,000. But, the remaining 89,000 or so of you go back home with nothing. 

Oh, and to be eligible for the lottery, you need perfect attendance through the quarter. Getting sick is forbidden.

It’s exciting!”

The United Airlines Executive team shared these plans with their 90,000 union workers. The only surprise was that it took them 3 days to back track. It must be hard to appreciate the importance of ~1500 extra dollars in the year when you make upwards of ~$50M as a team.

It is easy to sit on the outside and question the intelligence and competence of the team that came up with this. But, it is likely the team is full of smart, qualified and generally accomplished people.

I’ve found it better to acknowledge that smart groups are capable of making dumb decisions if the culture of the group isn’t right. The truest manifestation of culture is in a decision making process. And, how a company hands out incentives, promotions and treats its employees and customers is the culture in action. This decision, then, points to a broken decision making process.

If you want to fix a group’s behavior, fix the culture. And, while that’s easier said than done, examining the decision making process is likely a good place to start.

I’d shared a post about a reflection from the movie Wonder earlier this week. It turns out that I received another special gift from the movie – a song called “We’re going to be friends.”

I also stumbled on a cover of the same song by a contestant on “Voice”  that has been stuck with me.

The song brought back a rush of memories and emotions as it is about those moments when you realize that you’ve found a friend. I thought of many such moments in the years past when “I could tell we’re going to be friends.” As our lives progress, many of the happiest memories we have are in the company of friends. It somehow gets harder to make great friends over the years. I think that is because friendship requires us to take a chance on people. And, perhaps our propensity to do so decreases as get older.

But, even so, when it does happen, it is a special feeling.

Some of the folks I thought about are still very close, some less so and some not at all. And, yet, every one of them helped me along the way in this journey.

I am very grateful for all those who took that chance on me.

It is natural to want to be complete when communicating your work. You understand, better than anyone else, the kinds of assumptions and caveats that go into the results. They shouldn’t be taken at face value and, more importantly, there are eleven edge cases that you thought of.

However, communication isn’t about you. Instead, it is entirely about the receiver and how what you write or say fits in their context. There is the rare situation when their context demands all the assumptions, caveats and edge cases.

But, for everyone else, we need to focus on clarity over completeness.

If the purpose of our communication is to bring them along or tell our story (and it generally is that), it needs to start with clarity.

(H/T to the wiser friend who gave me this advice)

Wonder is a 2017 movie about Auggie, a child with facial deformities, going to school for the first time in fifth grade. It is one of the most beautiful movies I’ve watched in a while.

The most beautiful thing about the movie is its depiction of perspectives. It shows similar events from the points of view of Auggie, his sister and her best friend. It is a master stroke as you begin to realize that the story isn’t just about Auggie (it just as easily could be) and connect deeply with other characters in the movie. And, it brings to life the idea that every person has their own challenges and viewing them based on their perspective and experiences would likely transform your view about them.

As a result, it is but natural that the overarching theme of the movie is kindness – “When given the choice between being right or being kind, choose kind.” But, a line that stayed with me is reflection from Auggie at the end – “Maybe the truth is, I’m really not so ordinary. Maybe if we knew what other people were thinking we’d know that no one’s ordinary, and we all deserve a standing ovation at least once in our lives.”

It is poignant and true. Everyone around us has struggles of their own. And, everyone does deserve a standing ovation at least once in our lives.

The problem with career and life plans is that they don’t work as per plan. But, that doesn’t render the act of building plans useless.

The trick, at least in my mind, is cultivate the habit of planning without ever obsessing about plans. And, the key to a good planning process is to be crystal clear about long term direction and short term process.

Doing so helps us avoid the trap of getting too caught up about the middle. Planning for the middle years of a 3-5 year or longer plan is a thankless task. There is no way you’re going to be able to predict the exact path and attempting to do so will likely only close you to possibilities. Planning for these middle years is also a recipe for unnecessary stress and disappointment.

When you’re at the beginning, don’t obsess about the middle, because the middle is going to be difference once you get there.

There’s a time to go slow. There’s a time to go as fast as you possibly can.

There are times when talking is helpful. And, there are times when it is best to stay silent and listen.

There are moments when it is worthwhile to try your luck. And, then there are times where it is best to be conservative.

There are situations when being gritty and persistent is helpful. Then, there are situations where it is best to quit and try something else.

The good news is that it is always a good time to approach things with a learner’s mindset. But, beyond mindset, the success of most things we do is dependent on the context. Even an action with the best of intentions and planning can be completely back fire when out of context.

The questions, then, are – are we being intentional about developing our awareness of the context we are in? How good are we at being context aware through the course of a day?

And, in the spirit of a learner’s mindset, what could we learn to get much better?