Category: Everything else

A senior monk and a junior monk were traveling together. At one point, they came to a river with a strong current. As the monks were preparing to cross the river, they saw a very young and beautiful woman also attempting to cross. The young woman asked if they could help her cross to the other side.

The two monks glanced at one another because they had taken vows not to touch a woman.

Then, without a word, the older monk picked up the woman, carried her across the river, placed her gently on the other side, and carried on his 
journey.

The younger monk couldn’t believe what had just happened. After rejoining his companion, he was speechless, and an hour passed without a word between them.

Two more hours passed, then three, finally the younger monk could contain himself any longer, and blurted out “As monks, we are not permitted a woman, how could you then 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?”

---

I think about this story from time to time when I find myself carrying hurt or annoyance of any sort. It doesn’t mean I always manage to overcome it. But, this story definitely goes a long way in reminding me that the only person we hurt by carrying past hurts is ourselves.

Now is all we ever have. And, how we treat now is the best way to ensure we feel better tomorrow.

I recently spoke to someone I met thanks to this blog about his hopes of making a career transition to a company in a different location. He had his thought process nicely laid out. I think my only value add to his process was asking him what plans B, C and D were.

I think of nearly everything I do in terms of projects. Some projects last a long time while others are shorter. And, over the past few years, I’ve had various career related projects involving attempted switches of companies, functions and locations. Some of these involved nested projects – e.g. going to graduate school to make the location change process easier or involved sorting immigration issues. Some of these projects worked. Some didn’t.

Every time I reflect on this journey (and speaking to him definitely made me reflect on it) and find myself thinking about the journey ahead, I am reminded of the quote – “If plan A doesn’t work, remember there are 26 letters in the alphabet.”

That quote has been very representative of how my journey has unfolded. Plan A has rarely worked. But, I’ve done my best to work through plans B, C, D and so on.

Just this morning, I learnt that a project I’d been working on for a while didn’t work out. It is, without question, a bummer. But, going through the process taught me a lot. I was grateful for the incredible support I received from many wonderful folks through the process and felt I’d given it my best shot. It is a reminder that there’s a lot outside our control and that that good processes don’t always lead to good results in the short run.

But, as I look back to the past decade, I feel confident about the long run effect giving processes you commit to your best shot. And, I’ve also learnt that a key part of running a good process is making sure you are preparing for and working through plans A-Z.

On days like this, I feel grateful for having the privilege to write here. There are the days when the tag line of this blog – “Never failure, only learning” – comes to life. It reminds me that we never know if a good day is a good day. All we can do is keep plugging away.

And, I definitely intend to do that.

We’ve all likely walked around with a bruise. That part of our skin feels exposed and uncomfortable.

In this day and age, we don’t walk around with physical bruises as much as as our ancestors did. Instead, we deal more often with mental ones. This could be because we’re facing a difficult situation, awaiting an important result or just stuck in circumstances that has us feeling insecure about our capabilities.

When I feel bruised, I know I’m more controlling than usual, more annoying than usual and more “on edge” than usual. It doesn’t feel pleasant. As a result, I don’t radiate pleasantness either.

I’ve learnt that there’s no easy solution to overcoming a bruise. We have to give it time. Until then, it helps being aware of the feeling so we can upfront with ourselves about it and try and deal with our reactions more patiently. A few guilty pleasures and more rest definitely doesn’t hurt.

We should worry if such phases last longer than a few days at most or a couple of weeks at a time in extraneous circumstances. If they do, it might be time to make a wholesale change in some part of our lives.

But, that aside, I think of bruises as normal service. It is part of being human and we learn a lot about our ourselves in the process of dealing with them.

I started this mini-series on synthesis with a post on moving from summaries to synthesis. This was the excerpt of the post that talked about the difference.

When we write a good summary, we ask ourselves the question – what were the main points of what I read/heard/saw? A good summary boils what we read, heard or saw into a few bullet points that outline the central thesis.

A good synthesis, instead, involves asking the question – how do I make sense of what I read/heard/saw? This is a fundamentally different exercise because a good synthesis involves combining ideas to form a theory or point of view.

But, this post raised the obvious question – how do we synthesize? Or, put differently, what tools can I use to transition from summaries to synthesis? We touched on the first tool yesterday – theories. A theory is an idea or a system of ideas that are intended to explain something. Theories aren’t intended to explain everything about the topic. But, they explain enough for you to understand it. I mentioned that theories are one of the tool good synthesizers use.

The other more dominant tool is a hypothesis. A hypothesis is a proposed explanation made on the basis of limited evidence as a starting point for the next investigation. The synthesis process typically involves tons of hypotheses because it isn’t easy going from something you just read/heard/saw to a theory. Hypotheses bridge the gap. Below is what the process looks like.

Let’s work with a live example. I saw a talk with Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson on their new book – “Altered Traits.” Altered Traits is about what they’ve learnt from a lot of the scientific research on meditation. I’ve thought of and tried practicing meditation for over a year. When I reflected on both what I read about meditation and my experiences around meditation, there were 3 hypotheses that emerged –

• Meditation feels like a route to mindfulness and equanimity
• Writing every day feels like meditation to me
• There are multiple ways to meditate or get to mindfulness – we should find a way that works for us

Ever since the hypotheses emerged, I’ve been looking for various ways to test these hypotheses. And, as I listened to the two authors speak, I found my hypotheses to be consistent to how they described the benefits of meditation. I expect to continue to find ways to test these hypotheses (I am in no hurry for now, of course). Over time, I’d expect a theory around meditation and mindfulness by writing to come together.

A hypotheses driven approach to life sounds, on first glance, like something that would only work in a lab. But, in truth, our life is the grandest experiment we run. Like all grand experiments, it is the sum and product of many small, daily experiments. We can choose to unintentionally stumble through them or do our best to be intentional about them.

And, should we choose to be intentional about them, it is critical to go into experiments with a hypotheses and learn from them. That’s what the process of synthesis helps us do.

That is also why it is a very powerful habit in the long run.

In her book Grit, Angela Duckworth lays out 3 theories.

Skill = Talent x Effort

Achievement = Skill x Effort

Grit = Passion + Perseverance

A theory is an idea or a system of ideas that are intended to explain something. Theories aren’t intended to explain everything about the topic. But, they explain enough for you to understand it. Theories are a classic tool for better synthesis of ideas.

In this case, Angela Duckworth helped us synthesize plenty of literature around skill, achievement and grit into 3 simple models. Again, they’re necessarily imperfect. But, they are very instructive all the same. Theories are a great example of what makes synthesis incredibly powerful. And, they are one of the two powerful tools that good synthesizers use.

(Hopefully that’s enough intrigue in advance of tomorrow’s post :-))

We learn by developing mental models. And, a technique to fast track the creation of mental models is to move from summaries to synthesis.

When we write a good summary, we ask ourselves the question – what were the main points of what I read/heard/saw? A good summary boils what we read, heard or saw into a few bullet points that outline the central thesis.

A good synthesis, instead, involves asking the question – how do I make sense of what I read/heard/saw? This is a fundamentally different exercise because a good synthesis involves combining ideas to form a theory or point of view. The ideas you drawn on for synthesis need not even be from the from the material you are synthesizing and could be from prior experiences or lessons.

As you can imagine, summarizing is easy. It is like riding a bike on training wheels. It takes all the risk away. But, in doing so, it takes away all the reward as well.

So, how do we move from summaries to synthesis? Just like we move from riding a bike with training wheels to riding without – ditch summaries. Synthesis takes effort and requires us to pause, reflect and bring together ideas in our heads. It is, by nature, risky.

But, it is only when we take that risk do we allow ourselves to fall and learn.

The Internal Revenue Service or IRS has the sort of fearsome, even legendary reputation, that good tax agencies have. A good proxy for this is the number of scammers who pretend to be the IRS. I get a call from at least 1-3 scammers every week – some human, some automated voices – who tell me I’ve committed serious tax fraud. They seem to get past do not call lists or any attempts to block them. Some of these are downright amusing as they involve Indian accented guys calling as “Officer Smith.”

But, I digress.

I took the first such scam call seriously until I realized something was wrong. A bit of follow up google searching told me that the IRS will always send you a note by physical mail and won’t just call you and threaten arrest.

So, you can imagine the trepidation when a friend of mine received an actual physical letter from the IRS saying there were inconsistencies in her tax return and that she owed them money. They said they would get back to her in a few weeks on the exact amount. This friend happens to be a former CPA who does her own taxes. So, she paid a tax pro to audit her financials and began working through her taxes over the past few years. She wasn’t sure what she had done wrong but this all sounded serious.

A few weeks turned into a couple of months. And, this issue continued to niggle with occasional worry and anxiety.

They finally got back to her this week. The outstanding amount of 26 dollars.

We had a good laugh.

There’s a life lesson about focusing on things we control in here somewhere.

Having toured lots of factories in a developing country, an Australian management consultant told the government officials who had invited him: ‘My impression as to your cheap labour was soon disillusioned when I saw your people at work. No doubt they are lowly paid, but the return is equally so; to see your men at work made me feel that you are a very satisfied easy-going race who reckon time is no object. When I spoke to some managers they informed me that it was impossible to change the habits of national heritage.’ 

This Australian consultant was understandably worried that then workers of the country he was visiting did not have the right work ethic. In fact, he was being quite polite. He could have been blunt and just called them lazy. No wonder the country was poor—not dirt poor, but with an income level that was less than a quarter of Australia’s. For their part, the country’s managers agreed with the Australian, but were smart enough to understand that the ‘habits of the national heritage’, or culture, cannot be changed easily, if at all. As the 19th-century German economist-cum sociologist Max Weber opined in his seminal work, The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, there are some cultures, like Protestantism, that are simply better suited to economic development than others.

In a book written by an American missionary who’d lived in this country for 25 years, he observed that the people ‘give an impression . . . of being lazy and utterly indifferent to the passage of time.’

The country the Australian consultant and American missionary were talking about is Japan in the early 1900s. Irony abounds, doesn’t it? :-)

Similarly, in the 1800s, books from the British and the French frequently described Germans to be dull, “indolent” and incapable of the kind of cooperation required for enterprise. (H.T. The Bad Samaritans by Ha Joon Chang for these examples)

There are many powerful lessons in these anecdotes – two of which stand out to me. First, when we are exposed to cultural stereotypes, we often take them as truth that has been passed on to us over the centuries. In truth, however, stereotypes are a recent phenomenon. Most nations didn’t exist in their current form just 200 or so years ago. And, their people didn’t behave the way we think they’ve always behaved. This is a great lesson in being wary about stereotypes.

And, second, cultures are more malleable than we think. That two of the most productive and hard working nations on the planet were labelled lazy not very long ago in our human history should give anyone striving to make change in their organizations and communities heart.

And, just think, if cultures with millions of people across generations are so malleable over the course of roughly one human’s lifespan, what does this say about our ability to change ourselves?

I broke my rohan at rohanrajiv dot com email over the weekend. I tried making a change around email forwarding on wordpress’ admin panel and that overrode the Google Apps set up that I use. A couple of interesting lessons as I reflect on this –

1. Our gut is often ahead of our brain in spotting issues. Something felt wrong with my email account. I felt it because it is unusual to go 2 straight days without receiving a single email from someone in the ALearningaDay community. Second, I expected some reactions to the post on “Calm” as it is the type of thing I normally get reflections and lessons learnings about from many of you on similar journeys. So, again, I felt something was wrong but did nothing.

Finally, thanks to Philippe Alexis, who tracked me down on LinkedIn to tell me that emails were bouncing. And, no surprise, he shared his reflections on the Calm post along with the heads up. :) Thanks so much, Philippe.

2. Making changes on interconnected systems takes work. This is a nice example of what happens when you change something with interconnected systems without testing it. This is such a simple system – with 2 variables. And, yet, changing one variable affected the other.

The lesson here is around the challenges of driving change in large organizations with many interconnected systems. I’ve been working for a relatively large organization for a year now and I’ve found some of my assumptions around speed to be challenged. Many assume that large companies are slower than small companies due to organizational politics and less driven people. The former is generally, but not always, true (more people) while the latter is definitely not a given.

They generally overlook the fact that the most important driver of slower pace, in my opinion, is due to interconnected systems. When you make a change in a system with 15 other interconnected systems, you need to ensure all of the rest continue to work after you make the change. That takes time. As a result, you can easily build a risk averse culture if you get penalized for breaking things.

That’s also why “move fast, break things” is an intriguing motto. It flies in the face of how large interconnected systems work. But, it is clearly the kind of motto you need to emphasize speed over caution.