Category: Everything else

Incremental is passe in a world obsessed with disruption and big changes.

But, you can’t really plan for disruption. You can create an environment which brings in talented people and allows them to ship new and interesting ideas. But, you can’t expect them to create something disruptive.

Similarly, you can invest in a new course or in learning a new skill. But, you can’t go in expecting it to change your life. It might. But, it likely won’t.

The challenge with disruption is that it is only easy to spot with hindsight.

What we can count on instead is incremental change. Every day, we can make our products a little better than they were yesterday. Every day, we can make ourselves a little better than we were yesterday. These incremental changes compound when consistently done over time.

We regularly overestimate what we can get done in a year and underestimate what we can get done in a decade. That’s because we greatly underestimate the power of consistent, incremental change.

In the long run, there are few forces as powerful as that.

Yesterday’s post was the culmination of 9 years of writing on this blog. During my first year of attempting to write something every day, I came across a story called “The Daffodil Principle.”

It was the story of a mother whose daughter badgered her to go see the daffodils. She finally did it. Here’s the rest of the story.

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Then, as we turned a corner, I looked up and gasped. Before me, lay the most glorious sight.

It looked as though someone had taken a great vat of gold and poured it over the mountain peak and its surrounding slopes. The flowers were planted in majestic, swirling patterns, great ribbons and swaths of deep orange, creamy white, lemon yellow, salmon pink, saffron and butter yellow. Each different-colored variety was planted in large groups so that it swirled and flowed like its own river with its own unique hue. There were five acres of flowers.

‘Who did this?’ I asked Carolyn.

‘Just one woman,’ Carolyn answered. ‘She lives on the property. That’s her home.’ Carolyn pointed to a well-kept A-frame house, small and modestly sitting in the midst of all that glory. We walked up to the house.

On the patio, we saw a poster. ‘Answers to the Questions I Know You Are Asking’, was the headline.

The first answer was- ‘50,000 bulbs,’ it read.

The second answer was, ‘One at a time, by one woman. Two hands, two feet, and one brain.’

The third answer was, ‘Began in 1958.’

For me, that moment was a life-changing experience. I thought of this woman whom I had never met, who, more than forty years before, had begun, one bulb at a time, to bring her vision of beauty and joy to an obscure mountaintop. Planting one bulb at a time, year after year, this unknown woman had forever changed the world in which she lived. One day at a time, she had created something of extraordinary magnificence, beauty, and inspiration. The principle her daffodil garden taught is one of the greatest principles of celebration. And she created not for others, but for herself, for the nature, for her surroundings.

That is, learning to move toward implementing our vision and dreams – one step at a time, often just one baby-step at a time and learning to love the doing, learning to use the accumulation of time. When we multiply tiny pieces of time with small increments of daily effort, we too will find we can accomplish magnificent things.

‘It makes me sad in a way,’ I admitted to Carolyn. ‘ What might I have accomplished if I had thought of a wonderful goal thirty five or forty years ago and had worked away at it ‘one! bulb at a time’ through all those years? ‘Just think what I might have been able to achieve!’

My daughter summed up the message of the day in her usual direct way. ‘Start tomorrow,’ she said.

There is no better time than right now to be happy. Happiness is a journey, not a destination.

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The story nicely illustrates what I set out to do.

9 years done. 31 to go (hopefully!). :)

The hardest thing about gratitude is remembering to be grateful.

I took our car to the service center yesterday to fix a problem that we thought had already been fixed. I learnt that we needed to replace a part. But, the part was in stock. So, it just took a few hours to complete the job. And, a little bit of inconvenience aside, I was able to drive home at the end of the day.

As I reflected on that this morning, I realized that I almost never thought about it. A whole host of things could have easily gone wrong. The part could have not been in stock. Or, the repair could have taken a few days. And, had that been the case, I would most likely have been thinking about it and perhaps even cursing my luck.

But, since all had worked great, I simply moved on.

Simply moved on. 

How many such things do we simply move on from? And, how many of those things are deserving of our gratitude?

Often, the things we barely notice are the things we need to be paying more attention to.

I’ve noticed that there’s a fixed upper limit in the amount of content I deal with. This upper limit is split between creation and consumption. It looks something like this –

A practical example – I read about 4 books in January, another couple in February and made progress on a few more. My content consumption level was high. But, once I started the “Notes by Ada” project, I’ve found myself reading very slowly. Writing an in-depth weekly article on technology takes time, energy and requires me to flex a new muscle. So, the amount of bandwidth I have to absorbing new content has gone down significantly. Part of it also ties to the fact that writing requires me to absorb different kinds of content in a deeper way – e.g. a deeper look into technology news than before. But, part of it is just the amount of mental energy I have left.

There are a few interesting lessons from this observation. Here are my top 3 –

1. It is important to not set goals in isolation. Many of these work together. And, I think there are other such pairs of behaviors or actions that have a fixed upper limit. One such pair is the amount of time you spend on the content of your work versus marketing it. That’s a topic for another day. But, I think there are more.
2. I learn a ton more when I create content than when I simply consume it – even if I’m taking notes. The difference lies in synthesis.
3. We learn a lot more when we observe why we do things a certain way rather than simply beat ourselves up for not doing enough.

Every day, we have the opportunity to pick the standard our work will live up to. But, how do we create it?

A friend pointed out that the general misconception here is that it is the standard of the big projects that matter. I can see why that might be the case. It is the end-of-year examinations mindset.

But, standards are created by the smallest actions on our worst days. They are a function of how we treat people when we’re low on energy and hungry, of how much we get done on a slow day and what we do when the stakes are low.

Standards follow character – how we behave when no one is looking. And, we build character by doing the small things with extraordinary love.

In the long run, these small things are the big things.

We live in a world with a constant stream of data. Thanks to our email, television programming, social media and the news, our feeds and watch list never stop. So, we all learn two truths about it –

First, you can never beat the stream. There’s always more and it always wins. The unread folder doesn’t stay unread for long.

And, second, the stream doesn’t serve you. It just is. And, it is on you to not to serve it.

These truths push us to make a few choices. Three important choices are as follows.

1. We need to decide which portions of the stream actually contribute to our productivity and, thus, happiness. It is on us to separate the signal from the noise.
2. We need to build systems to limit or ignore the portions we don’t care about. The wider we spread ourselves, the less value we extract from the portions that matter. Filters matter and should be applied thoughtfully.
3. Unplugging every once a while helps us get perspective. Dealing with data constantly is exhausting.

Many of us spend huge portions of our life dealing with the stream on our phones, laptops and televisions. Let’s make sure that we’re consciously engaging with it.

We have a choice this morning – we get to pick the standard that our work will live up to.

We get to decide whether our work is good, average, best-within-the-circumstances or otherwise. Every piece of work either maintains, raises or lowers our standards. And, over a period of time, folks who see us operate just draw a line and extrapolate our usual standard of work.

It is these standards that help build great working relationships and teams. Teams and cultures align around the standard expected of them. They all agree that this is the kind of work they do – whether or not anyone is looking.

In the really long run, our work rarely matters. But, our standards, on the other hand, they are everything.

First, we make them. Then, they make us.

You do.

Always.

Time to own it and drive it then.

Great products and brands have one thing in common – they understand the job their customer hires them to do. In technology firms, these jobs are called use cases. While a product might have multiple use cases, it is critical to have one or two killer use cases. One such example of a killer use case “Fuel on the run.”

In our core Marketing course at graduate schools, we studied the 3 killer use cases of McDonalds. One of them was around kids, one was around affordable food and the last one was what we described as “fuel on the run.”

To understand this better, imagine you are at the airport and have 30 minutes to go before your flight. You are hungry and want to grab something quick. It doesn’t have to be something tasty. You just need “fuel.” McDonald’s thrives on people who need a quick pit stop on the go.

It is a use case I relate to a lot because I look for hotcakes and a hashbrown when I’m on a road trip or at an airport. It is the only time I think of McDonald’s and they never fail to deliver.

There’s a lot not to like about McDonald’s. But, there’s also a lot to admire about the way they’ve nailed a simple use case.

Tim Harford, an economist and writer, wrote a posted called “The Problem with Facts” recently. In it, he explained that fake news isn’t a new idea. The most powerful exponents of fake news were the tobacco industry. If you have a few minutes to spare, the article comes highly recommended.

For years, the tobacco industry sowed doubt about research linking tobacco and lung cancer in the minds of smokers. And, for the most part, succeeded. This has a lot to do with the mindset people are in when they’re reading these facts. If people seek the truth, facts help. If they’re just looking for selective reasoning, facts are useless. In some cases, they can even reinforce the myth.

That brings us to a possible solution. So, here’s the conclusion to the article that shares that.

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We know that scientific literacy can actually widen the gap between different political tribes on issues such as climate change — that is, well-informed liberals and well-informed conservatives are further apart in their views than liberals and conservatives who know little about the science. But a new research paper from Dan Kahan, Asheley Landrum, Katie Carpenter, Laura Helft and Kathleen Hall Jamieson explores the role not of scientific literacy but of scientific curiosity.

The researchers measured scientific curiosity by asking their experimental subjects a variety of questions about their hobbies and interests. The subjects were offered a choice of websites to read for a comprehension test. Some went for ESPN, some for Yahoo Finance, but those who chose Science were demonstrating scientific curiosity. Scientifically curious people were also happier to watch science documentaries than celebrity gossip TV shows. As one might expect, there’s a correlation between scientific knowledge and scientific curiosity, but the two measures are distinct.

What Kahan and his colleagues found, to their surprise, was that while politically motivated reasoning trumps scientific knowledge, “politically motivated reasoning . . . appears to be negated by science curiosity”. Scientifically literate people, remember, were more likely to be polarised in their answers to politically charged scientific questions. But scientifically curious people were not. Curiosity brought people together in a way that mere facts did not. The researchers muse that curious people have an extra reason to seek out the facts: “To experience the pleasure of contemplating surprising insights into how the world works.”

So how can we encourage curiosity? It’s hard to make banking reform or the reversibility of Article 50 more engaging than football, Game of Thrones or baking cakes. But it does seem to be what’s called for. “We need to bring people into the story, into the human narratives of science, to show people how science works,” says Christensen.

We journalists and policy wonks can’t force anyone to pay attention to the facts. We have to find a way to make people want to seek them out. Curiosity is the seed from which sensible democratic decisions can grow. It seems to be one of the only cures for politically motivated reasoning but it’s also, into the bargain, the cure for a society where most people just don’t pay attention to the news because they find it boring or confusing.

What we need is a Carl Sagan or David Attenborough of social science — somebody who can create a sense of wonder and fascination not just at the structure of the solar system or struggles of life in a tropical rainforest, but at the workings of our own civilisation: health, migration, finance, education and diplomacy.

One candidate would have been Swedish doctor and statistician Hans Rosling, who died in February. He reached an astonishingly wide audience with what were, at their heart, simply presentations of official data from the likes of the World Bank.

He characterised his task as telling people the facts — “to describe the world”. But the facts need a champion. Facts rarely stand up for themselves — they need someone to make us care about them, to make us curious. That’s what Rosling did. And faced with the apocalyptic possibility of a world where the facts don’t matter, that is the example we must follow.

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What can we do in our lives to have better narratives around facts and enable more scientific curiosity?

Thanks Tim, for an excellent article.