Category: Everything else

You might want to avoid bad decisions.

However, avoiding bad decisions is a poor goal because you only develop judgment over time. So, achieving it would mean making less decisions, taking less chances, and beating yourself when something inevitably goes wrong.

Decreasing experimentation in the long term is a very expensive decision.

Perhaps our goal instead should be to make sure we avoid making the same bad decision twice. This way, we keep the experimentation but ensure we take the time to learn from our experiments.

As the saying goes, good judgment comes from experience. And, experience comes from bad judgment.

So, here’s to occasional bad judgment.

A simple technique for answering questions better –

Step 1 – If you are certain you understood the question, answer it directly.

Step 2 – If you are in doubt, paraphrase what you heard in your own words to make sure you’re answering the right question.

It is tempting to shoot for efficiency and aim to just answer every question that comes at you.

But, constant attempts at efficiency often come at the cost of effectiveness.

There are many great stories about genius musicians playing on street corners, unrecognized.

My takeaway from these stories is that many look, few see and fewer take notice.

There’s a section of those who’re walking who don’t even realize their presence. Many look in that direction but their eyes likely glaze over. A few see that something is going on – maybe they even realize it is something good. But, the choice few dig deeper and take notice.

Great talent scouts learn to notice talent. Great leaders notice leadership and remember to call it out. Happy people learn to notice things they are grateful for.

We can, of course, be all these things. But, first, we must learn to see. And, once we learn to see, we must then learn to take notice.

The Daimler internal combustion engine first made its appearance in a 1902 race for horseless vehicles in Paris and looked like this.

It won. It also went on to change the world.

But, it’s time has come. I predict that we’ll see roads dominated by electric vehicles in a decade. And, we’re likely to see roads dominated by global autonomous car fleets owned by leading ride sharing companies after that. Of course, we’re all going to be touched by all this change in ways we can hardly imagine. How we own and drive cars has shaped how we live and how our cities have been built.

That’s the topic of my bi-weekly essay on the car revolution. More on Medium or LinkedIn.

There’s a lot of talk about how our current generation of human beings is “always on.” We’re always connected, always checking our feeds and emails and always texting.

The price we pay is an overwhelming sense of unhappiness. We seek to get rid of tension, postpone thought and shun solitude by looking into our phones.

But, it is precisely those things that help develop self awareness, help us grow and get better. And, there’s no happiness without such awareness, love and growth.

It may be hard, depending on what you do, to consider a life that embraces the opposite. But, it is possible for us to find middle ground. Less checking, more switching off, more depth and quitting any social media that isn’t making us better.

Always on is a recipe for always unhappy. Happiness (the state, not the feeling of pleasure) rarely accompanies more time with our devices.

Always on isn’t a necessity.

We have a choice.

Our daughter has been attempting to alternate between turning, crawling and sitting over the past few weeks. That means she often loses control and, occasionally, “falls” – i.e. hits her head on the floor with more force than she might expect.

While it likely hurts a bit, we’ve noticed that her first reaction is not to cry. Instead, it is to look at us. She generally has a shocked look that seems to say – “Something weird just happened. How am I supposed to feel about this?”

On our part, we’ve made it a point to smile, cheer and clap every time she falls.

So, when this happened a few days back, we did the same even though we muttered to each other – “Man, that must have hurt her.” But, voila, she saw our smiles and claps and had a thrilled look on her face too.

It was a powerful moment for me as two important lessons hit me. First, so much of early parenting is about the interaction effect between the parents and the child. It is like an improv act with very little dialog as we all play off each other.

Of course, this principle doesn’t just apply to parents but to the teams we work in as well.

And, second, so much of how we react to situations is based on subconscious assumptions of how we’re supposed to feel. The moment we let go of that and give ourselves the time to respond, magic happens.

Much to learn from kids, we have.

There are two steps to practicing appreciation –

1. Noticing something that deserves appreciation
2. Appreciating it

We’re not taught how to appreciate things. We generally pick it up from someone around us who does it. It is not that we don’t want to appreciate things. Many of us, at some level, understand that appreciation matters, But, the act of doing so feels awkward. We are stopped by questions like – “Will this make this situation awkward?,” “Will I sound unauthentic?”

Here’s the issue – most people go through their lives feeling little appreciation. We live in an age with a lot of material wealth but little mental well being. It would be foolish to blame it all on a lack of appreciation but a few consistent good words go a long way in lifting people’s minds and spirits. Appreciation is the grease that helps families and teams function better. It has the potential to make days and change life.

The biggest challenge with practicing it is simply doing it. Appreciate something today. Then, do it again tomorrow. As you keep doing it, you’ll notice a lot more that deserves appreciation. And, suddenly, you’ll realize that virtually everything around you deserves a word of genuine appreciation.

The best part about this practice is that there are two beautiful side effects. First, as you learn to genuinely appreciate others, you learn to appreciate yourself. The act of doing so builds our humanity and, somehow, makes us feel better about ourselves.

And, second, the act of doing so fills us with gratitude because it helps us not take things for granted. Trading expectations with appreciation is one of the surest signs of the presence of happiness.

Corporations report measurement errors to their customers all the time. Here’s a simple two step test to determine the difference between measurement errors and management issues –

1. If the number of times you’ve unearthed measurement errors in your business is <=2, they are likely just errors.
2. If you’ve found more than 2 errors and if the errors repeatedly favor you over the customer, then they aren’t measurement errors. We are looking at management issues that are likely manifesting themselves in everything you do.

For example, I’ve been a Comcast subscriber for 13 months now. I’ve called or live chatted with customer service to report measurement errors 9 times in 6 of the 13 months. And, each time, the error involved Comcast charging me more than they should have. Hence, not a measurement error but a management issue.

As a customer, keep a lookout for repeated measurement errors that count against you. Such businesses have management issues that are going to pop up in the future as well.

And, as a builder of products and services, if you find yourself dealing with repeated measurement errors, take a long, hard look at the incentives and culture you’ve created.

One way to live your life is to always feel owed.

How does that work? Well, you likely did something for somebody and they never returned paid you back. But, to add insult to injury, they don’t even acknowledge it much these days.

That ungrateful wretch. You’ll show them when you get a chance.

Of course, you probably way overestimated the impact of what you did.

But, that’s not even point.

Expectations are toxic. And, carrying these expectations with you just increases the amount of toxic material in your brain. It doesn’t just mess with how you think, it also messes with every other thought in your system.

Nobody owes you anything. You do things because they either make you feel better or because they appeal to some inner sense of purpose. So, if you’re walking around feeling owed, you’re inviting unhappiness.

Every once a while, it’s worth asking – “When do you feel owed? What does it take for me to feel owed?” And, find ways to take the time to shed all those expectations you are carrying around. Life feels lighter and better.

Being creative often involves being intellectual middlemen.

In an interesting study,  Kellogg school of Management Professors Jones, Mukherjee, Stringer and Uzzi analyzed 17.9 million research papers for novelty by assessing how much they’d been cited and what combination of sources they’d cited. They found that – the highest-impact science is primarily grounded in exceptionally conventional combinations of prior work yet simultaneously features an intrusion of unusual combinations.

Charles Duhigg interviewed Brian Uzzi for his book “Smarter, Faster, Better” and Uzzi said – “A lot of the people we think of as exceptionally creative are essentially intellectual middlemen.” That is, “They’ve learned how to transfer knowledge between different industries or groups. They’ve seen a lot of different people attack the same problems in different settings, and so they know which kinds of ideas are more likely to work.”

So, how do we become better at being intellectual middlemen? The abstract of the paper offers a clue – Novel combinations of prior work are rare, yet teams are 37.7% more likely than solo authors to insert novel combinations into familiar knowledge domains.