Category: Everything else

Plans are important because they represent the result of our attempts to visualize our path to an outcome. A well laid plan is an indication of the amount of attention and thought we dedicated to visualization.

Visualization, in turn, matters because everything we build is created twice – first in our minds and then in reality.

But, plans are just an outcome of the visualization process. And, like most outcomes, they don’t matter much. Things rarely work as per plan because it is impossible for us to visualize every obstacle in our path.

And, that’s okay.

We are defined not by the details in our well laid plan but by our ability to thoughtfully respond to change and plan again.

In essence, it is not our ability to plan but our habit of planning that makes the difference in the long run. Or, as Dwight Eisenhower put it beautifully – “In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”

This is a really tough time if you are attempting to build a start-up that dreams of competing with Google and Facebook.

I think there 3 reasons for this

• There’s very little white space to build an app that will get traction. The list of top 10 apps has been virtually unchanged for the past few years.
• Even if you do — against the odds — Google and Facebook will know (Facebook tracks app activity via Onavo – a security app it owns while Google has Android and search) and either buy you out or copy you.
• And, even if you manage to survive that, you have to compete against an incredibly sophisticated suite of advertising products.

So, I argue that there are only 2 ways to compete –

1. Bet on the future (e.g. augmented reality)
2. Focus on a niche

It is hard to be everything to everybody. So, the best bet is probably focusing on a niche that involves high usage or high  value. That is what most of their successful competitors do.

All in all, I don’t believe this is the time to be building a technology company that seeks to compete with Google and Facebook. As is generally the case with such dominance, it is hard to predict an end to it. It looks certain that we’re going to move toward a world with mixed reality and the existing giants seem to have a strong advantage going in.

But, then again, history reminds us that technology waves don’t play out as we expect. We are currently in an age with an incredibly centralized communications architecture and it is hard to imagine a decentralized world in the near future.

Maybe that’s why the blockchain revolution is one to keep an eye on.

More on my bi-weekly “Notes by Ada project” note on Medium or LinkedIn.

Seth had a post today today on “what you know vs. what you do” that spoke to me. I’ve been exposed to Bitcoin since 2011 and had plenty of opportunities to invest a small amount. But, I didn’t. I’d been mulling about what I learnt from the situation. Then, of course, Seth did what he usually does and summed it all up with characteristic insight and incisiveness.

---

In 1995, my book packaging company published one of its last titles, an anachronism called, Presenting Digital Cash. It was the first book on digital cash ever aimed at a mass audience. And it was ahead of its time, selling (fortunately) very few copies. The examples in the book were current, but it was soon outdated. (The foreword was written by Neal Stephenson—someone who is ahead of his time for a living).

Thirteen long years later, Bitcoin was introduced to the world. I didn’t invent it, even though I’d written about digital cash more than a decade before. I’d created an entire book about digital cash, and thought about it deeply for months.

Except I didn’t buy 1,000 dollars worth of Bitcoin in 2008. If I had, I’d have more than $40,000,000 today.

It’s not that I didn’t know.

It’s that I didn’t act.

Two different things.

I knew, but I didn’t know for sure. Not enough to act.

All the good stuff happens when we act even if we don’t know for sure.

---

A long time A Learning a Day reader sent me a note a few weeks ago talking about how he signed up for Seth’s blog after I’d recommended it (for the nth time in these years). He then apologetically explained that he was beginning to like his blog better.

That note made me smile.  I wrote back explaining to him that Seth’s daily notes set the bar that I, every once in a rare while, try to match. :-)

Unexpected twists can be painful. They mess with our wonderful plans and push us to consider alternatives and approach things differently.

The funny thing about this change is that the process becomes easy, enjoyable even, once we accept the fact that changing our approach is the only alternative. It is accepting the unexpected twist that causes most of the pain.

What if, instead of simply accepting unexpected twists, we expected them?

What if we called projects with no unexpected twists unexpected?

A simple flip could get rid of a lot of unnecessary angst.

There was a term I heard a few years back about how good client-consultant relationships work. The way I heard a consultant describe it was – “As a consultant, you start small and mushroom.”

The idea here is that you rarely want to go into a client relationship with a big bang – a large team, a big scope, etc. That involves a lot of pressure and works, depending on the context, every once a rare while. Instead, you want to start with a small and interesting problem, do a fantastic job, earn trust and keep building from there. The verb “mushroom” fittingly means “increase, spread, or develop rapidly.” When you build trust with a smaller, interesting problem, you are given the opportunity to work on larger, more interesting problems with bigger teams.

This is a concept I think about from time to time. It is always tempting to seek that big break or big jump in responsibility. And, every once in a rare while, it might even happen. But, we don’t control that. And, seeking stuff we don’t control is a recipe for unhappiness.

We do, however, control our ability to start small, earn trust and mushroom – regardless of the context. This means being willing to embrace change, start afresh with a learner’s mindset and earn the responsibility to tackle bigger and most interesting challenges. And, of course, being willing to do that all over again. And again.

It is how most of us get to do work that matters.

Most importantly, it is how great teams, organizations and careers are built.

Being a leader involves exhibiting deep care about people, processes and results. This care manifests itself in many small ways –

• Following up on commitments
• Ensuring the customer’s needs are represented in the room
• Respecting people’s time by showing up on time and, in connection oriented jobs, responding to them in time
• Showing up prepared
• Running great meetings
• Never hesitating on asking the tough questions – but always doing so in a constructive manner
• Documenting thought process and rationale thoroughly
• Bringing a positive attitude
• Seeking to understand and then to be understood
• Demonstrating great care for team members by enabling them to learn and grow

There are occasions and roles when you have to act like a leader more often than not- e.g., lead from the front and be the decisive voice in the room. But, these are fewer and increasingly not the norm.

Instead, most jobs are a lot more about being a leader versus acting like one. Exhibiting deep care doesn’t require you to lead from the front. Instead, it works best when you lead from behind – that is the kind of leadership required in most roles anyway.

Finally, what is often forgotten is that you have to first be a leader to earn the right to act like one.

People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.

The law of conservation of energy says that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. It just changes from one form to another.

I think work works similarly. Work is always present – it just changes from one form to another.

In our lives, we need to work hard to understand ourselves, our priorities and design a schedule that works in alignment to them.

At the office, work involves carving out time for deep thinking, staying engaged in the many meetings we attend and making every hour we spend “at work” count.

At home, we work to keep our homes clean, to cook good food, to take care of ourselves and to pay attention to each other.

There may be a few weeks of vacation every year when we don’t need to worry about doing all this work as much. But, it is the work we do the rest of the time that enables us to get those few carefree weeks.

Anything of value requires work. Thus, the work never stops.

And, that’s a beautiful thing.

One of the most fascinating parts about observing children is their indomitable spirit.

Have you watched a child learning a new skill? They just never stop trying to learn. It is a constant cycle of try, fail, learn and repetition of that cycle again and again and again.

We were fortunate to observe a kid learning how to stand up the other day. She kept falling. But, no matter – she refused to give up. No amount of falling was going to stop her trying. Her enthusiasm to learn was contagious. I was excited to learn something, anything, after watching her.

I wonder what kills this tireless quest for new experiences and learning. Is it parents who quash the enthusiasm? Teachers? Friends?

When I see kids hurl themselves into new learning experiences, I remember the quote – “9/10ths of education is encouragement.” What if  we, as parents and teachers, sought to educate less and chose to encourage more? Would we see more instances of indomitable spirit?

I don’t know. But, it certainly seems worth a shot.

In the 1950s, during the lingering wake of the devastation of the Second World War, Japan was intensely focused on growing the nation’s economy. A large portion of the country’s population lived in or between the cities of Tokyo and Osaka, which were separated by just 320 miles of train track.

Every day, tens of thousands of people traveled between the two cities. And in addition to the thousands of people who traveled on these trains, tons of industrial goods were transported on them, too. But, because Japan had so many mountains spread throughout and in between the two cities that it made an already old and outdated railway system even slower due to the rough and mountainous Japanese terrain the trains were forced to travel on; making the trip as long as 20 hours.

So, in 1955, the head of the Japanese railway system issued a challenge to the nation’s finest engineers: invent a faster train.

Six months later, a team unveiled a prototype locomotive capable of going 65 miles per hour—a speed that, at the time, made it among the fastest passenger trains in the world.

“Not good enough,” the head of the railway system said. He wanted 120 miles per hour.

The engineers told the head of the railway that this just wasn’t a realistic expectation—and was, in fact, a pretty dangerous undertaking because a train designed to go that fast (120 miles p/hr) along the sharp and mountainous Japanese topography would definitely derail if it turned too sharply, and end up killing everyone on board as a result. No way could they design a train to go that fast.

So, instead of 120 miles an hour, the engineers said that 70 miles an hour was a much more realistic number to shoot for, 75 if they were lucky. Any faster and the trains would just crash.

“Why do the trains need to turn?” the railway head asked.

“There are numerous mountains between the cities,” the engineers replied.

The railway head shot back—“Why not make tunnels, then?”

Tunnels, huh? The labor required to tunnel through that much territory could require just as many physical and financial resources as it did to rebuild the entire city of Tokyo after World War II.

Three months after that conversation, the engineers came back to the railway chief with an engine that could go as fast as 75 miles an hour.

You can probably already guess what the railway chief said – “75 miles an hour has absolutely no chance of transforming the nation!”

Incremental improvements would only yield incremental economic growth.

The only way to revamp the nation’s transportation system was to rebuild every element of how these trains functioned. Everything.

So they got to work, and over the next two years, the engineers experimented: they designed train cars that each had their own motors. They rebuilt gears so they meshed with less friction. They discovered that their new cars were too heavy for Japan’s existing tracks, and so they reinforced the rails, which had the added bonus of increasing the train’s stability, which added another ½ mile per hour to train’s speed.

There were hundreds of innovations, both big and small, just like these; each of which made the trains just a little bit faster than before.

And after tons of tiny tweaks and years of hard work and hustle under the Japanese railway chief’s go-big-or-go-home style of leadership, the very same team of engineers that thought it was impossible to build a 120 mile train—ended up building a 120 mile train.

In 1964, the Tōkaidō Shinkansen, the world’s first bullet train, left Tokyo and made its 320-mile trip towards Osaka. Except this time, instead of taking twenty hours, the trip took only four.

—

A fascinating story about how the Shinkansen was built from “Smarter, Faster, Better” by Charles Duhigg. Often, the prerequisite for building great things is relentlessness and a willingness to question every current norm and start anew.

The surest sign of a great process is knowing you left no stone unturned. That’s when you walk away knowing you did everything in your power to make it work.

A great process doesn’t guarantee a good outcome, however. The higher stakes the outcome, the more likely a good proportion of the result isn’t in your control. So, things can and will, on occasion, go south.

But, you don’t control that.

You control effort. And, an effort that leaves no stone unturned is the kind of effort that allows you to let go and completely accept the outcome.

That’s the thing with great processes – they don’t guarantee the outcomes you seek but, in allowing you to let go, they do guarantee long term happiness.