Category: Everything else

Unintended consequences

Most decisions we make have unintended consequences. These unintended consequences are typically caused by the downstream effects of a decision, i.e., your decision results in something (that you likely hoped for), that, in turn, causes something you probably didn’t intend.

There are 2 ways to avoid negative unintended consequences –

1. Experience. If you’ve experienced it before, you know what to expect and how to guard against it. This is how good lawyers earn their keep. They are fantastic at scouring all available legal literature to make sure you are protected from negative consequences of important decisions.

2. Developing the discipline to let it play out in your head. While experience is ideal, if we’re learning and growing, it is likely that we’re exposing ourselves to new situations. And, developing the discipline to let the trickle down effects of our decisions play out in our head is vital to making good decisions. Lazy decision making has bad consequences – a decision whose immediate effects may look good may have bad after-effects. It is only when we make the effort to let decisions play out in our head do we understand the real trade-offs involved. Making decisions by understanding trade-offs to the best extent possible is good strategy.

A simple example of this is letting people schedule times on your calendar for meetings at random. If you have meetings scheduled every 2 hours every day this week, say goodbye to doing work that matters.

The interesting thing about letting the effects of decisions play out in your head is that you often realize that, while the context may be different, you’ve experienced something similar in the past. And, when realize you’ve seen the movie before, you also know exactly how it ends.

unintended consequences, decisions

People who gave you a shot

Today, let’s take a few moments and think about and give thanks to the people who gave us a shot – at a time when we most needed it.

Let us then think about and give thanks to the people who went out on a limb and advocated for us – when they absolutely didn’t need to.

Then, let us also think about and give thanks to the people who believed in us – at a time when we didn’t necessarily believe in ourselves.

And, now that we have given thanks to these wonderful people who’ve shaped our lives, let us go be that person for someone else.

When you are thankful

There is a lot written about gratitude and understandably so. The saying – “It is not happy people who are thankful. It is thankful people who are happy” – definitely rings true.

That said, I don’t think the test is just about being thankful. I think it also matters when you are thankful.

For example, when I am down with a bad stomach or an injured foot, I naturally think about a fully fit body and find myself giving thanks for the fact that I only have minor niggles to deal with. But, those are examples of forced gratitude – gratitude that is caused by an intervention of sorts. Similarly, it is relatively easy to be thankful for your life or for those of your loved ones when you hear about someone passing away. Again, that’s thanks to an intervention.

So, I think the type of gratitude that really counts is when you give thanks at times when you don’t have any reason to give thanks. When everything is going great, we rarely find the time to stop and give thanks for everything that’s going well. But, I’d argue that doing so is a sign that you’ve got the “being thankful” skill (and it is a skill) down.

And, good thing too. There are few more important skills for a life well lived.

thankful, gratitude

The Road Less Traveled

In the “Road Less Traveled,” Scott Peck begins with –

“Life is difficult.
This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult-once we truly understand and accept it-then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.

When he dives into the topics of reflection and change, he raises the question – is it ever possible to become free from emotional pain in this life? And, the answer is yes and no. Yes, because once it is accepted, in a sense, it ceases to be pain. And, no, because competence brings with it responsibility and power. And, when you wield power, you need to make decisions and the process of making decisions with self awareness is a painful one.

I wrote about this a few weeks back when I shared how making it a habit to tell it as it is hasn’t gotten easier with time – even if I do it habitually. To this, Scott has a lovely response – “The best decision-makers are those who are willing to suffer the most over their decisions but still retain their ability to be decisive.” 

I loved that. I’ve found that to be very true. And, to me, that speaks to the difference between aiming for non-attachment and detachment.

A dear friend recommended this book to me a few days ago and I decided to buy a paperback (an unusual occurrence but I’m finding myself drawn to paperbacks again, of late) and keep it by my bedside table. Such a good decision. I’ve found myself nodding once every paragraph. In Yoda’s style, this book would be described as – “Packed with wisdom, this is.”

road less traveled,

The moment we grow up

The moment we look at ourselves in the mirror and say – “I am responsible for my life experience” – is the moment we grow up.

It doesn’t matter whether we’re 20 years old or 80 years old. In some cases, some go through a lifetime without ever growing up – growth is completely independent of age.

The funny thing about this moment is that it isn’t that life gets any easier after you accept this. The difficulty level stays the same. But, we stop focusing on it. Instead, we focus on all the aspects of our life experience we want to fix. And, when we re-direct our focus to something, it fundamentally shapes our experience. The more we focus on things we control, the more we feel our ability to control things expands.

But, it begins with taking responsibility.

(It is futile to wait to be “given” responsibility for our own life experience)

grow, responsibility

A deep life

Cal Newport’s new book “Deep Work” is just out as of this week. I love Cal’s work and downloaded it the morning it came out on Audible and am looking forward to getting through it in the next two weeks.

deep work,

I don’t expect the book’s insights to surprise me – Cal’s thought process generally resonates with my philosophy and he also shares his thought process via his excellent blog. (My framework for doing work that matters is – focus x intensity x hard work – and the book focuses on the intensity portion.)

That said, I am excited about the book because I expect him to bring together all this learning, help condense it into a thesis and also help me think through actions to increase the percentage of time I spend in deep work mode. More depth = more mindfulness after all.

So, I am looking forward to obsessing about “deep work” in the next 2 weeks. After all, as Cal nicely puts it, “a deep life is a good life.”

Here’s to that.

Is it the light?

The lights flickered for a brief moment in our Finance class the other day. Our Professor, who was in the midst of teaching a concept, abruptly asked – “The lights did flicker, right?” Once we’d nodded, he added with a smile – “Just wanted to make sure I wasn’t having a stroke or something.”

We all burst out laughing because the juxtaposition of a usually serious person cracking a joke made it funnier.

Jokes aside, though, it highlighted something important. For all those of us who are generally hard on ourselves, when things go wrong, we often begin by assuming that we are the problem. The better path would be to treat our assumed reason as a hypothesis and test it by checking in with other people if they are involved.

Instead of doing that, we attempt to draw conclusions from our perception of their perception.

This incident was a good reminder of a simple idea – “when in doubt and where appropriate, just ask.”

What you do vs. how you do it

When we think of getting better, we tend to focus on what we do. Learn Photoshop/SQL/PowerPoint, etc.

Source

While focusing on what we do adds a lot of value in the short term, I would contend that the majority of the value in the long term lies in our ability to improve how we do things. Learning to structure problems/design a life that maximizes focus and intensity/be more productive/learn all have huge long term impact.

Sure, go for that skills upgrade. It is probably on your mind because it is urgent.

But, don’t forget the important stuff just because immediate returns can’t be easily measured.

Feeling bad because of something you said

I had a moment yesterday when I felt bad about something I said in passing. It stayed at the back of my mind for thirty minutes after the conversation.

The interesting thing was that one part of my brain was naturally finding ways to avoid the situation. For example, a couple of ideas it threw were to ask questions about a different topic we hadn’t spoken via text about to divert attention to something else.

After realizing this wasn’t going away, I decided to pick up my phone and text – except I expressed exactly what I was feeling and said I was feeling bad about that moment and wished I hadn’t said it.

The best part about doing the right thing is that you know it is the right thing the moment you’ve done it, regardless of the response. I felt lighter and better after that. I heard back later as well – all was good and we laughed it off.

I am a big fan of being direct. This was a nice reminder of its power – when you feel bad about something you said, just talk about it. So much of living life well is simple. The onus is on us to not complicate it.

feeling bad

Investing limited resources

William Thorndike, in his book “The Outsiders,” profiles 9 CEO’s who achieved extraordinary financial results in comparison to their peer group and the overall market. In doing so, he found many similarities in their approaches, but one stood out – these CEO’s excelled in allocating limited resources.

As a CEO, there are 3 broad things you can do your time –
1. Optimize operations
2. Allocate resources (capital, people, your time and energy)
3. Media relations

These CEO’s spent almost no time on media relations and generally worked with a COO they trusted to run operations. They, then, were ruthless about their time, ran extremely lean and decentralized organizations that empowered their people to lead and allocated capital phenomenally well.

As leaders of our own selves, there is a lot we can learn from their behavior. In the final analysis, our effectiveness will be a function of how we’ve allocated our limited time and energy. This means taking the time to develop a set of principles that determines how we will spend this time and energy vs. saying yes to anything that pops up. This also means being intentional about our priorities at any given time vs. mindlessly succumbing to the many distractions that surround us.

Tim Urban had a wonderful post called “The Tail End” on his hugely popular “Wait But Why” blog. In it, he shared the following image –
investing limited resourcesEach box is a week and these are all the weeks in a 90 year lifetime. And, by now, you have probably marked the rough spot that is this week in your life.

There is limited time and energy to go around. Let’s use it well.