Category: Everything else

Reactions and responses

When we face bumps in the road, we can spend time on reactions – oh crap!,” “why does this happen to me?,” “what will they think?,” “is this really my fault?” – or responses – “what is the creative, constructive, corrective action to be taken here?.”

3 things to know about these modes –

(1) Human nature dictates that we have to spend time in reaction mode first. There is no getting away from it even if we know it is a complete waste of time. It doesn’t help that it feels good to be in this mode for the short term.

(2) Given we have to spend time in reaction mode, the choice we exercise is whether to spend a quick second or many hours (depending on the nature of the problem, we may even lose the ability to respond after some time). We have limited time to deal with any given problem – so, every second wasted in reaction takes away time from our response.

(3) Moving from reaction to response is governed by how quick we move to take responsibility (response-ability). The quicker we’re able to shoulder the responsibility for what happens to us, the more painless the transition. And, this response-ability is among the strongest indicators we have of the strength of a person’s character.

Dropping baggage

There’s a famous zen parable about the importance of dropping baggage and letting go.

Two monks were at the banks of a river with a strong current when a young woman asked if they could help her cross. Carrying her would be against their vows. But, without a word, the older monk carried the woman across the river and carried on with his journey.

The younger monk couldn’t believe what happened. A few hours passed before he blurted out – “How could you carry that woman on your shoulders?”

The older monk looked at him and replied, “Brother, I set her down on the other side of the river, why are you still carrying her?”

Simple reminders to reset, like this one, are powerful because we all accumulate baggage on our journeys. We develop preconceptions about some relationships, projects, and ways of approaching problems. These preconceptions erode our ability to approach things with a beginner’s mind and listen for learning. Most importantly, they make it impossible for us to simply “be” in the present moment. The baggage weighs us down and muddles our focus.

Take the time today to think about (or meditate upon) areas of your life that seem spew negativity in your day.

Perhaps it is time to let go and journey lighter.

Separating the writing from the thinking

“For the average business or professional writer, producing more literate memos and reports does not mean writing shorter sentences or choosing better words. Rather, it means formally separating the thinking process from the writing process, so that you can complete your thinking before you begin to write.” | Barbara Minto, The Pyramid Principle

I’ve decided to spend more time learning how to write better and thought “The Pyramid Principle” and “The Elements of Style” would be my go-to textbooks for the structure and style portions of this journey respectively. But, as Barbara Minto thoughtfully points out, we often confuse feedback in our ability to structure our writing as feedback to our style.

Structure is the first summit to conquer. To do so, I’ll need to do a better job separating the thinking process from the writing process.

Don’t seek great mentors, seek great influences

Mentorship is a luxury. A great mentor relationship requires many favorable conditions – chemistry, good timing, and proximity among them. And, yes, when it works, it can have a magical effect on the learning curves of both the mentor and the mentee. But, so much of finding that great mentor relationship is outside our control that it is a reactive approach to learning at best, and lazy at worst.

Great influences, on the other hand, are all around us. We have more access to admirable folks than ever before. The life, work, and thought processes of luminaries like Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, and Marcus Aurelius are just a book away. That person you admire likely has a blog, a book, or an active twitter account. If we are the average of the five folks we spend our time with, it is easier than ever to be exceptional by simply letting ourselves being influenced by the wisest minds in human history.

The best part about great influences don’t have to be famous people. Your inspirational co-worker or parent can do the job as well.

We can, of course, wait for that great, uber successful, mentor to pick us and continue to let ourselves off the hook until they do.

Or, we can go seek great influences, learn from them, and keep plugging away.

Our choice.

What policy led to this bad outcome?

Julia Galef, a writer on rationality, had a great spin on how we can better separate processes and outcomes and pick where we want to maximize. When things go wrong, she asks herself – “What policy am I following that produced this bad outcome?”

For example, she shares a policy example wherein you always arrive 1 hour 20 minutes before a flight. However, this policy may result in you missing the occasional flight due to an accident on the road. But, if you over react to the bad outcome and change policy to be at the airport 2 hours earlier, as a frequent flier, you’re going to be spend hundreds of hours waiting at airports.

Similarly, I could spend 2x the time before sending every email to ensure there isn’t any typo or mistake. But, that would be a very expensive policy that would eat in to other productive time. So, it is best I assume that there will be mistakes and repeat sends that fix them from time to time.

There are a few places in life where we need a 100% success rate. It makes sense to choose fail safe, rigorous policies in those cases. But, otherwise, we’re better off picking good policies/processes/decisions that do the job most of the time.

And, in the off chance they don’t work, we must learn to habitually separate bad outcomes from good processes.

(H/T: Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss)

The jerk threshold

Every one of us is capable of exhibiting jerk behavior. We just have different ways of doing so – we either move against people, move towards people, or move away from people.

Put differently, some fight fire with fire, others fight it by exhibiting passive aggressiveness, and yet some others attempt to ignore the situation. Each of these behaviors are counter productive in tough situations. But, it is hard to catch them because they are flip sides of our strengths. There’s just a threshold after which these strengths become counter productive.

The questions that follow are – i) when is that threshold triggered? and ii) how can we better catch ourselves?

Some triggers are relatively easy to solve for. For example, most folks are triggered by a lack of sleep or food. The harder ones are when baggage in relationships activates a pattern that results in triggering jerk behavior.

Catching ourselves is really hard – there is no fail safe way I know of. The best solution is a consistent, high degree of self awareness that isn’t easy to sustain. The next best solution is acceptance of our own fallibility. If we can accept that we exhibit jerk behavior from time to time, it becomes easier to catch ourselves when we do…

 

Tool problems and clarity of purpose problems

When we’re trying to drive change, we typically run into two types of problems – i) Tool problems or ii) Clarity of purpose problems.

For example, I’ve come to believe I am one true reset away from being a much better version of myself. This is coming from months of observing my desire to ‘seek to understand and then to be understood’ wilt as I move through the day. I kept telling myself the importance of finding a way to reset over the course of the day – but, change never came as I was clear about why it mattered.

I finally got a timer app to remind me to do so every 30 minutes and resetting has worked better since.

Similarly, an organization may want its employees to start entering granular expense reports for compliance reasons. If this isn’t communicated, employees may not get on with the program. Then again, even if they do understand, if their expense recording software is draconian, employees may still be dissuaded from entering expenses.

When we’re looking to drive change, it helps to be clear if we’re trying to solve a problem with the tool or with a clarity of purpose. And, zooming back further, the best solutions are designed for problems that are well understood.

We decide how we show up

There’s always a reason to show up in a way that doesn’t reflect our best self. The weather, your mood, the current situation, the economy, that pain in your knee – take your pick. And, these extraneous factors seem to grow in importance the more attention we pay to them.

But, they are just manifestations of the resistance. They’ll stick around till we decide we’re done with the excuses.

No matter the weather, the situation or the mood, we can choose to show up to be positive, thoughtful, and learning focused if that’s how we want to show up. It is our call and deciding to relinquish that call is our call too.

It is a bit of work – especially on days when said conditions are not ideal. But, it is work worth doing.

A finance thesis sheet

Managing finances is a lot like managing our teams, work or lives. The principles we need to do a good job as managers of our finances are easily accessible – a penny saved is more valuable than a penny earned, compounding, time value of money, and diversification among others. There are many ways to apply these principles and it is on us to pick our own philosophy and style.

Like a management philosophy, picking a financial philosophy involves making peace with the fact that it won’t work at all times and in all situations. Every process has a range of expected outcomes. So, if we choose to be a low risk investor who expects to spend very little bandwidth thinking about money, we can’t expect to make an investment that gives us 1000% return. It may happen. But, the more likely scenario is that it won’t.

The challenge, however, is that we don’t start off knowing what kind of manager or investor we are. Luckily, thanks to the scientific method, that is a solved problem. We pick a hypothesis and begin working toward it. As we experiment and inevitably fail, we begin to learn and develop an approach that begins to work for us.

And, I’ve found that a reliable way to ensure that we’re extracting all possible lessons from our stumbles is to maintain a finance thesis sheet. The only requirement to maintain this is write out these principles, your philosophy, and your hypothesis. Then, keep a log of every key financial decision you make and what you learn from it.

Over time, this thesis sheet will become richer and better and will enable us to iterate our way into a style that suits us.

Just as in management and life.