Category: Everything else

The 2 project design

In a conversation with Cal Newport after he published his latest book, Deep Work, a friend asked him how his writing projects fed into his “real job” as a researcher and professor. He explained that his books had no impact on whether he’d receive tenure. But, since he wrote about how to work better, his findings fed into how he approached work. He also added that his experiences had led him to believe that it is only possible to really do justice to 2 projects at any given time – your work and one other meaningful project. It is an idea that stuck with me and one I call “The 2 project design.”

We must all take time to design our ideal lives. A simple life design process will typically have 3 steps –

1. Setting a few design principles – we’ll call them values or guiding principles. This should ideally do 2 things – state your overall priorities and commit to a few habits/systems you’d like to have. For example, overall priorities in my case are self-care, framily-care (framily = close friends and family), work-care, and world-care. A few habits/systems I’d like to have are sleep 8 hours, eat healthy, exercise, read, and catch up regularly with framily.

2. Create the design constraints – These habits/systems should now give you design constraints. For examples, my systems take away 8 hours every night, 30-40 mins during the day around exercise, another 30 mins reading, etc. They also set boundaries on what the ideal work day would be. Once I have this down, I do a quick check to make sure if my schedule is in alignment with my principles.

3. Design for a maximum of 2 “good work” projects. I think we all want to do good work – however we want to define it. Good work speaks to our need for purpose and our need to answer that existential question – what should we do with our time? For most of us at this point of time, one of these projects is our paying job – our work. I would consider thinking of this in this way –
– The career project – present and future. Think of the career project as having 2 parts. The first part is the present – this is all the stuff you do every day to be employable and earn your keep. The second part should be thinking about and working toward your future. This need not be more than a few hours per week. But, it matters that you think of it and work toward it.
– The learning project. The second side project I’d strongly consider is the learning project. Do something, anything, to aide your overall learning and development. Some of this learning could feed into your career projects. But, it matters that we invest in ourselves. The key distinction between these 2 projects is that the learning project is not done with any intent to monetize. It is, in a sense, “not-for-profit.”

All this will need to be applied to your context, of course. If you are pursuing a career in research, for example, you may not need to spend time working on your “future” as that is what you do as part of your job. But, for the many who fight fires on a daily basis, having a future component is critical. My learning from attempting side projects over the years is that these side learning projects help you learn and grow in ways you will never imagine. But, after having attempted one too many, I have come to realize that Cal is spot on – focus your energy on your career project and ONE central learning project.

Once you design these, it’ll be interesting to see where they all have overlap. For example, if you are hugely passionate about not-for-profits and social impact, maybe you’ll design your learning project as running a not-for-profit on the side and make sure you do plenty of daily reading on the topic. These overlaps/”synergies” will develop over time. Another example – if you care about spending time with framily, maybe a couple of your exercise slots will involve playing games with them. The possibilities are endless.

Designing your life is a very personal experience. There is never going to be a “right” way to do it. If you are sharing your life with a partner, it makes sense to be as coordinated as possible. In that sense, there may be a few “right” constraints. But, beyond that, it is your life to design. What matters most is that we’re intentional about it and that we iterate our way into a design that works.

2 project designThanks to source for the image

 

2 questions for better conversations

We’ve all been in conversations where all we seem to be doing is discussing stuff that doesn’t really matter. Even sharing what happened to us is only fun for a while. These conversations often feel devoid of emotion. Here are 2 questions I’ve found to help with better conversations –

1. What have been among your biggest learnings since we last caught up? (of course I’d say that)
2. What are the decisions you are struggling with/mulling about and how can I help?

2 questionsThanks to source for the image

The second question is a recent learning from a conversation with a much wiser friend. I was amazed at how quickly it cut through the noise into a discussion of what actually mattered.

I’ve noticed a marked difference in conversations that involve discussions with one or both questions. The good news is that we don’t always have to be the person asking the questions – we could just weave this in to the end of our updates when we catch up with our friends to make them deeper and more meaningful.

Better questions -> better conversations.

Characteristics of great advice

Great advice typically has 3 characteristics –

1. It begins by exploring questions that are deeper than the question asked. If, for example, the question asked is “what advice would you have for me to be successful here?,” the deeper question is “how will you measure success?” The first step, as a result, is to take a step back. If you don’t find a deeper question, that’s okay. The key is just to be willing to dig deeper.

2. Next, the principles/governing assumptions are called out. Continuing the thread on advice to be successful, the principles could be self-awareness (understand yourself), intention (figure out what you want) and a learning mindset (keep focused on the journey and getting better). Getting to principles or governing assumptions requires a bit of thought.

3. Finally, it deals with tactics. For a long time, I scorned tactics as I felt they hurt more than they helped. Most bad advice tends to just be a list of tactics. If the principles are stated, then we ought to be able to figure out the tactics ourselves – or so I thought.
I’ve come to realize that tactics often serve a different purpose – by boiling difficult things down to a set of concrete ideas, they help inspire those listening to take the all important first step. It is an important component of great advice.

That’s my advice on the matter in any case. :-)

Thanks to source for the image

Machines take away horrible jobs

Quartz had a feature a few days back about the struggles of young women working in tea gardens in North East India. Tough conditions, bad wages and inhuman treatment are features of horrible jobs. That’s the bad news. The good news is that it is likely machines will replace those women within the decade. That should be celebrated because machines take away horrible jobs.

But, it will likely result in political propaganda with politicians promising to bring those jobs back.

Politicians in countries who promise to bring back jobs to their respective countries omit two truths. First, it is that those jobs are not really coming back. A piece of manufacturing that required 1,000 workers is likely best done now with 20 engineers and a collection of robots. Second, when those jobs were around, workers constantly complained of inhuman conditions.

The jobs our politicians want to bring back are never the ones we wake up wanting to do.

In our desire to avoid conversations that matter, it is easy to blame machines. So much easier to do that than to discuss the real issues on the table and so much easier to postpone the inevitable socio-economic disasters that are in the making if we continue to avoid the flip side of technology innovation.

But, for those of us who are willing to see things as they are – machines are going to take away large portions of what we do. Anything we consider repetitive is going to be done by a machine. Anything that requires functions we’re not very good at (searching vast amounts of information, statistical analysis) will be done by machines. We will be freed to do other, better stuff. In the post industrial world, machines in industries freed us to create job titles like ballerinas, violinists and zumba investors. This time will be no different. In having machines replace large parts of what we do, we will go back to answering that all important question – “What should we do with our time?”

The conversations we should be having are all around the question – how do we bring about changes to an economic system that was built on the foundations of an industrial world?

The machines are here to stay. They will continue to take away horrible jobs and, then, horrible pieces of our jobs. Let’s focus on what we need to do to support the many workers who are and will continue to be displaced by the shift.


Audi car factory in Germany – thanks to the Telegraph for the image

HT: The Inevitable by Kevin Kelly

The energy management question

If you are feeling energetic, you don’t need much time to get what you want done. But, give yourself in a lethargic state large amounts of time and you will likely not get much done. Hence, it follows that energy management is way more important than time management. A key first step in good self energy management is – what activity best recharges your batteries?

For most people, the answer to this question is one of sleep, food, exercise, listening to music, interesting work, social time or a hobby. The answer does change according to context. But, it is very likely every one of us have a stack ranked list. Knowing the list is helpful because you have a clear action when you’re feeling low energy. If you’re feeling low energy in the middle of a work day for example, you just work through your list and rule out what’s not possible. If taking a nap is not possible and if you just finished lunch, perhaps you could take a quick walk or give a friend a call? And, if it is closer to the end of the day and you aren’t feeling the best, maybe the best thing to do is wrap everything up and go to bed.

So, how do you figure out the list? You might have a hypothesis intuitively. But, there’s few better ways to understand this than to test it over a period of time. Observe your energy during the day and get good at understanding what works best when you feel low energy. Try out different solutions during bouts of low energy and make your list over time. A likely side effect of doing this is also understanding what causes bouts of low energy. For example, there might be certain kinds of food that may not be helping. Or, you might find that going two days without exercise has very negative effects on your energy.

Our productivity is a direct function of our energy management. And, understanding how to do that well requires us to keep asking ourselves that question – what activity best recharges our batteries?

energy managementThanks to Lifehacker for the image

The gratitude loop

Small things go wrong all the time. Things break down, people act in unexpected ways, and minor plans fail. The “ideal” you shoot for hardly ever works out as per plan because of small nits. When these things happen, we tend to have a choice between two paths – the victim loop or the gratitude loop.

The principle involved is similar to the idea that we choose between judger questions or learner questions at any given point of time (HT Marilee Adams for the wonderful choice map that I’ve shared many a time). It just extends the concept a bit.

the gratitude loop

When we’re dealing with small annoyances, the smallest reaction of anger can lead us down the victim loop. It begins with some level of denial, then some irritation, then some more irritation, anger and general unhappiness. This loop involves heavy doses of playing victim and, thus, not taking responsibility for something that happens to us. The obvious flaw in our thinking is that we point to the fact that it is somebody or something else’s doing. But, if it is affecting us, it really is our responsibility. In every case.

The gratitude loop does something different – it treats what is going on as a non-issue and gives thanks for the fact that nothing worse happened. Faced a flat tire? Thankfully it wasn’t the engine. Sprained your angle? A fracture would have been long lot worse. You get the idea.

The beauty about the gratitude loop is that it tends to take us down a path of increasing gratitude. For every small annoyance we face, there are literally a hundred worse things that could have happened. And, since nothing monumentally bad took place, all is really fine. We just have to learn to see it that way.

How we deal with small annoyances is a measure of the strength and size of our character. If we react to every annoyance and make mountains out of mole hill, then we really are small people. To be able to transcend that and focus on bigger and more important things, we have to learn to get over the small stuff.

In the long run, how we deal with the small things are the big things.

The next game

Reputations are useful till you enter the field to play the next game.

But, they don’t count for much once you begin playing that next game. The moment you choose to play, you choose to do the hard work of continuing to to do the hard work of building your own character and, thus, managing and building that reputation.

When you are in the game, there is no such thing as resting on past laurels. Yes, it helps if you’ve had a great run in the last few – but, only up to a point. You are only as good as your next game.

And, what got you here won’t get you there.

the next gameImage Source

Anti-intellectualism and racism

Fearing and, thus, hating someone who is different from us is a natural emotional response from a brain wired for life in the forest fighting other warring hunter gatherers. Racism, as a result, is a natural part of our humanity. We are all racist and discriminatory. If it isn’t based on color, we discriminate based on religion, education, sexual orientation, nationality, caste, etc.

The relationship between education and discrimination is a fascinating one as it is one that is underlined with a lot of tension. The reason for this tension is that an educated mind is one that treats every belief as a hypothesis that needs to be tested. Galileo Galilei, one of the fathers of the scientific method, discovered this was an issue in 1610 when he faced the ire of nearly every institution that mattered. The church, arguably the most powerful of those institutions then, took nearly 500 years to declare him innocent.

The essence of discrimination is blind belief. Education, thus, is dangerous as it shakes its foundations of discrimination. As a result, a key part of the oppressors playbook is to control the education its citizens receive. If you can fake education, i.e. pretend to educate while not really teaching the scientific method, people will never find out.

Until they do, of course.

This is why the Brexit was a damning verdict for anyone concerned about the state of the world today. It wasn’t because the Brexit was the absolute wrong result. There is a case to be made that it was a good result for both sides in the long run – that Britain will benefit and that the EU will treat it as a wake-up call to right the many issues inherent in its structure. The issue was the way it happened. It happened without the voters really understanding why they were doing what they were doing. It happened without any debate of the real long term issues. It was a classic anti-intellectual process and it was as good as a bunch of fearful people voting yes for xenophobia.

That is also why the November election in the United States is critical. It is becoming increasingly clear that the beliefs that drive the Republican party in the United States is not that of smaller government, but one of cultural disillusionment. It is also becoming increasingly clear that “make America great again” seems to just be a different version of “make America white again.” There are a lot of direct effects of the Republican nominee becoming President but probably none as powerful as the brand of anti-intellectualism that he espouses.

The key part of the Donald Trump message is simplicity. It is a clear action plan that involves shutting down borders, breaking ally agreements and building walls. These simple steps will put an end to the death, gloom and destruction. Leaving aside facts about violence and the like, this sort of simplicity ignores that one thing that makes debate necessary – nuance. Or, to use a more fitting term, trade-offs. Good decision making requires an understanding of trade-offs. Good decision making requires spirited debate and an understanding of nuance. But, discussing nuance isn’t what won Trump the Republican primary. It isn’t what he is about. He makes decisions based on his gut and data is for losers. Well, life can be relatively simple when you are born into a brash household in the top 1%. It isn’t that simple for everyone else and it is certainly not going to be simple when you govern in an interdependent world.

This is one direct effect, however. The full list is long. The most important indirect effect, in my assessment, is that I think his coming to power will sadly reverse the trend on discrimination and racism. The facts on violence and discrimination tell us one thing for certain – as bad as things seem, they have only been getting better and are better today than ever before. However, the moment we give up our willingness to debate, we indicate that we are open to flexing our discrimination muscles. It is a recipe for bigotry – an intolerance toward those who hold different opinions from us. If we are intolerant toward different opinions, can you begin to imagine what the future holds for people who look different from us?

This indirect effect is beautifully summed up in a line from a comment I shared following the Brexit – “But, can anybody tell me the last time a prevailing culture of anti-intellectualism has led to anything other than bigotry?”

When indeed…

anti-intellectualism and racismThanks to Storify for the image

There is too much to read

There is too much to read. That is a fact.

But, if that is an excuse for incompetence or for post factual debates, then it is a poor excuse indeed.

When Google released data of Britons searching for what Brexit meant after the event, it was tempting to laugh at their ignorance. Yet, is that different from most parts of the world right now?

The easy, lazy solution is to assign blame. Blame the CEO who gives you false assurance, blame the politician who runs a campaign based on lies and blame whoever else you think is wrong.

Like all easy, lazy solutions, it is useless and accomplishes squat. Better to say “mea culpa” and move on – no one to blame but us. Everyone at your company is educated – there is no reason they shouldn’t be able to get to the truth of what the leadership is saying. Wherever you are, if there are more educated people than not, there is again no reason they shouldn’t be able to get to the truth of what their politicians are saying.

No, the issue is not one of education. It is one of the worst kind of incompetence – one that is embraced by people who could quite easily be competent.

We live in an age where you can get most questions answered by simply typing or saying a few words. If we wanted more, we could also just get a few books on that topic of interest written by people who’ve devoted a lifetime to research on that topic. Is doing this a guarantee that we’ll get to the truth? Probably not. But, is doing this a guarantee that we’ll begin to understand what is going on and be more competent? Absolutely.

The chances are high that you’ll be a better spouse if you took the time to read a marriage book or two. The chances are very high that you’d be a better decision maker if you picked up one of the best decision making books out there. And, reading some of the best distilled wisdom on how to run your start-up is likely only going to aide you in the quest. If reading a book is too hard, no worry – just get a summary of the book somewhere – they’re a dime-a-dozen. Or, ask someone who has read the book to take 15 minutes to give you a summary.

But, if you refuse to do the pre-work or choose to scorn at the wisdom of those who’ve done it before, then you lose the right to expect competence from your leaders and those around you. If you don’t spend time understanding what is going on and where we’re heading, you lose the right to expect your politicians to be better.

If you’re wondering what it takes to flip the switch, it is simple. Spend 30 minutes every week day reading a book that will teach you something.

That habit alone will change all our lives. Not just yours – because you will then spread the goodness of all that reading to us. Thank you for doing that.

The only skill expected from your education is an eagerness to learn for the rest of your life. The rest is gravy.

there is too much to readThanks to Fast Company for the image

Great customer service email

I love a great customer service email. I always find it surprising when companies mess this up. In today’s day and age, it is so easy to create a beautifully customized email.

We recently purchased ceramic knives from a small vendor on Amazon called Oliver & Kline. Their initial email and follow up notes have been outstanding. So, I thought I’d deconstruct that today.

Hi Rohan, (Use the customer’s name.. duh. “Dear Customer” just shows an incredible lack of thoughtfulness given most of us know mail merge exists.)

Thanks a lot for picking up the Oliver & Kline Ceramic Knife Set!

Your order is being processed by Amazon. Before your product arrives, I wanted to let you know:

Have you ever used a ceramic knife before? If not, you’re in for a treat. These things effortlessly slice through anything in a way that traditional knives do not.

In addition, they hold an edge longer than any other type of knife you may have used previously – we’re looking at you stainless steel! (Always lovely to have a bit of humor. I could rationalize it by saying it makes me feel this is more human. But, that’s just because everything else is great..) Plus ceramic knives never rust and are easier to clean. This knife set looks great, cuts great, comes in a fabulous gift box, and are just plain fun to use!

To help you get the best results using our creamic (I would pick on this typo but the positive energy from the rest of the email makes me ignore it.) knife set, I have attached a short Users Guide (Combining the onboarding with the training manual – nicely done.). You are strongly advised to give it a quick read to prolong the life of your knives!

I predict that the high quality (and easy of use) will blow you away! (Love the positivity, cheer and can sense the pride in the product.)

I’ll email you as soon as it’s been shipped. (They did do this – albeit a bit late as Amazon shipped it ahead of time.)

Thanks again Rohan, we really appreciate your order! (Ah – the use of my name twice. I know it is just a merge field but it feels personal. And, this just isn’t done right usually. Well played.)
Sincerely,
Oliver & Kline
(My only gripe with this email would be that I’d suggest signing off with a human name. Always nice to be interacting with a human being.)

P.S. IMPORTANT, PLEASE READ: We’re 100% committed to providing you with a top-notch customer experience. If there’s anything that didn’t go right with your order, please hit REPLY to this email and let us know immediately before leaving a review on Amazon. I’ll look into it for you personally! (I love the – “I’ll look into it for you personally.” I think it might even be more powerful to just leave a phone number. But, this works pretty well.)

Remember – we’re in this together, and success stories from awesome customers like you is what brings a glowing smile to our face, so thank you for being a part of this movement!

The beauty about this email was that I was rooting for these knives before they even showed up. Sure, there isn’t a thing as a universally great customer service email. But, there are certain small things – personalization, positivity, humor and thoughtfulness – that easily make an average email into a very good one.

And, just to show it wasn’t a flash in the pan, here is their response when I thanked them for it.

Oliver&Kline email

Small things. Big impact. Nice job, Oliver & Kline.

PS: The knives are great.