Category: Everything else

I experienced two situations recently when a simple question changed an entire situation.

A good friend was mulling about a decision and we discussed the idea of running the decision by the – “Is this a hell yeah?” filter. If it isn’t a “hell yeah,” it ought to be a no. (HT Derek Sivers) Suddenly, the decision making process was greatly simplified. It worked much better than a long diatribe about decision making frameworks.

Then, a casual conversation was changed into an engaging, thoughtful and personal one when we all just asked each other – “What is the dream?” Our dreams offer wonderful insight into what drives us and the conversation took a fascinating turn.

We all know good questions are powerful. I do too, somewhere deep inside. But, situations like this remind me that I could spend more time thinking about good questions versus thinking about what to say or mulling answers to things.

The obvious question, then, is how do you ask good questions? My sense is that good questions and good judgment go together. So, good questions come from experience. And, experience, in turn, comes from bad questions.

We should just ask away till we get better. And, we will.

An idea that helps me keep perspective is the difference between challenging, difficult and hard.

Regardless of who we are, life challenges us. We always have problems to solve and ups and downs to deal with. That’s just life. Challenges make life interesting, fun even.

Every once a while, life gets difficult. These are typically times when we are pushed to our limits, overwhelmed and/or clueless. Difficulty is generally due to the effect day-to-day living has on our minds. In the words of Scott Peck, the best antidote to dealing with this difficulty is accepting that life is difficult. For, once we truly accept something is difficult, it ceases to be so.

Finally, for everyone who is reading this, it is likely that life is never hard. Hard is when you have to struggle for the basics, toil in the sun to get food on the table or hope for someone’s generosity to fill your stomach for the day. Everyone reading this has luckily escaped hard. In fact, it is on folks like us to remove “hard” from those who experience it.

And, the first step to doing that is to make sure we don’t lose perspective ourselves.

A friend said something wise to me the other day – “Great jobs are point-of-time references.”

A great job is generally a combination of a few things –

1. A location that you love
2. An industry that might be thriving
3. A company with a great culture and environment
4. A role whose scope is appealing
5. People who you work with who are inspiring

While dynamics around location and industry rarely change all of a sudden, a lot can change around the company, role and people. Senior leadership may change, the scope of the role could shrink and folks who you love working with could leave.

There are two lessons in here.

First, understand which of the 5 priorities (location, industry, company, role, people) matter most at any given point. That helps optimize for them.

Second, we rarely really know what we’re really signing up for. The best we can do is sign up for change and embrace it when it inevitably happens.

For 8 years since June 2009, I used to share a story or idea from a book with folks I’d met over the years via a mailing list. It turned out to be a wonderful way to stay in touch and share learning from books.

Over the past 3 years, that project came to be known as the 200 word project. And, I used to share these notes every Sunday. I decided to close that project last weekend. Below was my note.

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Aside from the many lessons shared, I reflected on the 2 biggest lessons I learnt from the process of putting these notes together –

1. Feeling comfortable shipping. This list is a collection of colleagues, managers, and clients from over the years. So, pressing the send button was a bit nerve wracking for a long time. Over time, I learnt to say “this might not work.. and that’s okay” as I kept the faith that the good and bad ones would average out over time. :)

2. Learning how to read a book. Thanks to this project, I pause every 5-10 minutes when I read and synthesize what I’ve learnt. It has been game changing.

Looking forward – Notes by Ada. But, like all good things, the time had come on this project. Post having a baby, time is more at a premium than ever before and I realized I’d like to spend my time learning more about technology – by sharing more, of course.

The Notes by Ada project is inspired by Lady Ada Lovelace. She was the first to visualize and write about the computer as a “general purpose machine” in a paper she aptly titled “Notes.” We’re living at a time when tech has far outgrown tech and my goal is to bring together weekly narratives around a theme every week. It is 11 editions old and includes notes on augmented reality, the unbundling of retail, and bitcoin among others. But, mostly, inspired by Ada Lovelace, it is really all about thinking about the future.

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I still haven’t made up my mind about whether I want to share weekly posts from the “Notes by Ada” project here as I also share them on Medium and LinkedIn. I guess we’ll play that one by ear.

And, while I don’t plan to share stories in the 200 word project format, sharing lessons from what I read is key to my learning. So, more to follow on that for sure.

Onward.

Trees never cease to inspire me.

They add so much to the landscape around them. They can be approachable, beautiful and majestic all at once. They outdo themselves in the value they add to us with shade, fruits, fresh oxygen and wood.

And, beauty and utility aside, there’s so much a tree stands for in our lives. There are many great metaphors around what the combination of roots, trunks and leaves stand for. And, rightly so. Trees beautifully demonstrate the greatness of this planet and of nature. They encapsulate the power of impact without needing to make a sound.

As a human waster who wastes so much and gives so little in the grand scheme of things, trees are reminders of how much we have to do to leave this planet a little better than we found it.

We are the average of the 5 living beings we spend time with. Today, I plan to spend time with trees and be inspired by them.

I hope you consider doing that too.

“Think big, act small and plug away” is the thoughtful doer’s credo.

We need big thinking – now more than ever. The big issues – the effects of climate change, the effect of robots on the future of work – aren’t going away anytime soon. There’s an unprecedented urgency for us to believe in our ability to come together as humans and to care.

But, there’s also little point in spending all our time worrying about things we don’t control. Instead, we must keep acting small, focusing on what we control, making it count and earning our right to influence things on a larger scale.

Along the way, we’ll have good days and bad days. It is hard to tell which is which in the moment. So, it is in our interest to not care about which is which and, instead, keep plugging away.

So, if we’re feeling stuck, disheartened or in doubt, let’s remember to go back to the credo – think big, act small and plug away.

Done consistently, it is how things of value get built.

If you read maps, it helps to understand that they come with 3 limitations –

1. Perspective: To show us the information we see, maps trade off a lot of potentially useful information.
2. The Cartographer’s bias: A map tends reflect the reality it wants to show. As an example, for the longest time, the maps of both India and Pakistan showed both countries possess disputed territory.
3. The territory: One map rarely does justice to the territory.

So, how do we become better map readers? First, be aware of the biases involved. And, second, get multiple maps and triangulate to get the best understanding of the lay of the land.

Of course, this post isn’t just about reading maps of places.

When we walk into organizations and communities, we effectively look at maps of these groups from the eyes of the people we choose to meet and to follow. We follow our managers, community leaders and parents and see the world from their maps until we learn to build our own.

And, this is a reminder to follow the best practices of a map reader. But, also, as a cartographer who offers maps to others, it is on us to call out our biases and provide multiple perspectives to those who count on us.

H/T The Farnam Street Blog for the limitations of maps.

Florence Foster Jenkins, the movie, is a fascinating story about a socialite and music lover in 1940s New York. Oblivious to her own lack of musical ability, she (i.e. Meryl Streep) tried performing as an amateur soprano.

Her loved ones kept her shielded from any real feedback for a long time. But, she eventually found out that she was mocked for her performances in the press. While obviously disheartened, in the closing scenes of the movie she said something that stuck with me – “People may say I couldn’t sing, but no one can ever say I didn’t sing.”

She was unequivocally right. Her failure wasn’t for a lack of effort.

How many of us can say that for things that matter to us?

Planning is an activity that has been proven to help us become effective. Plans are an outcome of planning.

The challenge both people and organizations face with planning is that it is easy to become wedded to the plans that emerge from the planning process. So, they refuse to change course and block progress if it comes down to it.

The reason? A plan is stationary and stationary objects bring a false sense of certainty along with them. That false sense of certainty is all we need to refuse change and the tension that accompanies progress.

The act of planning, on the other hand, serves a different function. It is, very simply, a proxy for thoughtfulness. A well run planning process asks us to be aware of the nature of our environment and to intentionally pick which direction we’d like to move toward. Of course, when the nature of the environment changes, we’ll need to change as well.

Thus, planning shares two characteristics that great processes share – it is dynamic and the process matters far greater than the outcome.

In the long run, our plans don’t matter. The habit of planning, however, makes all the difference.