Category: Everything else

When Drew Dudley was a student at college, he changed one girl’s life without even realizing it.

The girl was intimidated to start college and told her parents she couldn’t do it. They ended up convincing her to go to her first day, but said that they would fully support her if it didn’t feel right and she decided to quit. So she went the first day and, sure enough, she felt intimidated as she was standing in line to pick up her room key. Just as she was about to turn to parents to tell them she couldn’t do it, she saw Drew come out of the student union building. He was dressed like an idiot with a stupid hat on and was handing out lollipops to raise awareness for a charity. He came up and stopped near the girl.

He then confronted another nervous freshman guy standing next to this girl, telling him, “You, you need to give this lollipop to the beautiful girl standing next to you.” The freshman guy turned beet red, took the lollipop and awkwardly handed it to the girl next to him. Drew then turned to her parents and said, “Look at that, look at that! First day away from home, and, already, she’s taking candy from a stranger!” Everyone in line burst out laughing, and the girl finally felt a bit at ease and decided to stay .

Four years later, on his last day, the same girl came up to Drew and told him the story. She told him that it was the most important moment of her life, that she was felt intimidated and was ready to quit school before it even started. She told him she couldn’t have been happier that she stayed at school and it was all because of his little joke that made her feel welcome. And, she also told him that she was still dating the boy who gave her the lollipop and that they were getting married in a year!

Drew racked his brain and couldn’t even remember telling the joke and giving out the lollipops.

We’ve all probably had lollipop moments in our lives. In Drew’s words, perhaps we need to redefine leadership as being about lollipop moments – how many of them we create, how many of them we acknowledge, how many of them we pay forward, and how many of them we say thank you for.

Changing the world simply means affecting the people we come across in our everyday lives, because that literally is all “our world” is.
—
HT Jim and Drew Dudley’s talk on Everyday leadership

I woke up this morning and found myself going through a highlight reel of some of the dumbest things I said in public in the past few months.

This is an occupational hazard when you put yourself out there and occasionally speak off-the-cuff.

For a moment, I felt a lot of empathy toward public figures who say something stupid and find it picked up and misinterpreted in every possible by media outlets everywhere. They probably don’t need a mental highlight reel as they’re likely constantly reminded of that moment of stupidity.

Of course, the other side of the story is that good stuff they say is also broadcast all over the world. If you put yourself out there enough, mistakes will pop up.

The challenge is not to avoid mistakes but to avoid the illusion of perfection when things are, momentarily, going your way.

The best way to learn from mistakes is to simply say – “I make mistakes.. and that’s okay.”

Change and betterment come with acceptance.

But, the biggest benefit of this approach is that we also learn to be truly empathetic and understanding.

It is only when we forgive ourselves can we truly learn to forgive others. That is the true beauty of making and embracing mistakes – they teach us to be human.

There are 2 essential pieces to the hacker ethos made popular by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.

1. It requires people who are willing to experiment and fail. That doesn’t come easy and it doesn’t work for a lot of people.

2. But, more importantly, it requires leaders and managers who are willing to let go and let their people learn and grow

The toughest part about allowing people to moving fast and breaking things is that things actually do break. And, that is one of the biggest tests you face as a manager. It is far easier to do things yourself and not delegate. However, you will also get very little done in the long run as that approach isn’t scale-able.

It is impossible to learn without experimentation. And, it is impossible to experiment without failures. Embracing experimentation, therefore, isn’t a choice. It is a requirement. The world is a better place when we embrace “this might not work.”

After all, nothing ventured => nothing gained.

If you spend many months working with a great team, it is easy to assume that it is the leadership or management of the team that is making the team great. That is, however, a textbook example of recency bias. This is similar to looking at a Barcelona football team or a New York Yankees baseball team and attributing most of the greatness of the team to the manager.

Yes, the manager matters. And, yes, the manager can often be the the difference between a championship medal and a trophy-less season. But, if the team succeeds, it is likely that at least 50-60% of its success is due to great hiring. Even the greatest manager of all time can’t lead a bunch of high school players to a world cup win. But, every once a while, you will hear of ordinary managers leading a great group of players to incredible heights.

It works the same with bad strategy. You can follow great strategy with poor execution and still end up in a decent place. But, start with bad strategy… and it won’t really matter how good your execution is.

It is worth remembering that when we decide to say “yes” to the next commitment that squeezes time that we would normally spent either with ourselves or with our people that mean to us.

Starts often matter more than we think or realize.

Nearly every time I try to do something that will make me better – read, exercise, meditate, among others – I can feel the resistance pop up and find out if there’s a way I can postpone it. There’s so much going on right now. Wouldn’t it be better if I did it later?

I felt that voice this morning as I thought about switching on Headspace to meditate.

I did feel busy. I decided to do it anyway.

And, 15 minutes later, I wondered why I ever had second thoughts. I felt so much better. And, I know that happens every time I meditate.

So much of being happy is doing things that you know are good for you by pushing the resistance away and saying, with conviction – “It’ll feel better, later.”

I was fortunate to have the opportunity to do a lot of public speaking growing up. I am pretty comfortable on stage now. While it is easy to attribute this to natural talent, I was horrible when I started. My school believed in giving kids plenty of opportunities to participate in inter school competitions. And, I had been chosen to try my hand at public speaking. After a poor showing in my first 3 competitions, I was told that they’d begin to give other students an opportunity if I didn’t do well in my next one. I did, and didn’t look back.

This is the process I followed –

1. Write/type what you want to say. As a kid starting out, my mom used to write all my speeches. (Thanks mom!) It took me a while to find my own voice and write my own.

2. Practice. When I got started, I rehearsed every talk at least 20-30 times in front of the mirror. The “practice in front of the mirror” tip ranks among the best pieces of public speaking advice I’ve received as it contributed most toward a better end product.

3. Find your authentic style. I am not funny. So, I’ve learnt that it is pointless to try to be funny. I’ve also learnt that it becomes very annoying when someone is trying hard to speak like someone they’re not. Just be you. In my case, I tend to gravitate towards content that is focused on learning (surprise, surprise) in my own style. My public speaking voice and persona isn’t very different from my conversational voice and persona. I’ve found that alignment to be very helpful.

4. Talk about stuff that matters to you. This ensures that the passion comes through. If I had to go one step further, I would even say – say something that you think might make a difference in the lives of the folks listening. Too often, public speaking becomes a race to make people laugh.

As you can tell, the process is not rocket science. I still follow it to this day for most important talks. However, the benefit of having done it so many times is that I am comfortable with minimal practice. That helps a lot – especially when it comes to delivering presentations at work.

Many people fear public speaking. I think that fear is natural. I do not know anyone who jumped off the cradle ready to speak. In every speech during my first 10 years or so, my legs and hands used to shiver like nobody’s business on stage. You learn very quickly that the fear is just part of the process. You learn to embrace it and trust in your preparation. And, when you do, you’ll have people come up and tell you have “the gift of the gab.” :)

Whenever I think of great public speaking, I am reminded of the Sir Winston Churchill quote (paraphrased) – “There’s three weeks of preparation before a great impromptu speech.”

So true. Success lies in the hours.

I’ve veered off a bit from “normal programming” over the past 4 weeks – there haven’t been weekly MBA learning or product review posts. The reason for that is that I’ve dealing with a few extenuating circumstances. A mix of a massive project’s peak, illness, start of a new project, and a couple of setbacks meant that I kept focused on just making sure I wrote once a day.

However, as I was reflecting on the past ~30 weeks this morning, I realized that there was some disruptive force or another in at least 15 of the 30 weeks.

Thanks to Clayton Christensen’s warning in “How Will You Measure Your Life,” I had learnt that life is just a series of extenuating circumstances. But, I guess it is one thing to understand an idea and quite another to experience it. Looking back the past 30 odd weeks and seeing the regularity of these extenuating events has resulted in a lot of appreciation for the idea.

Perhaps I should just stop making these excuses and get on with it. There is no such thing as a “normal” week.

The obstacles never stop. I just need to learn to expect them and view them as part of my definition of normal.

There are times when circumstances force you to make difficult decisions. I’ve noticed that most of these decisions are personal. There isn’t a clear path forward and it is hard to really weigh all options. While I’m a huge fan of the WRAP framework for most decision, these are times when I feel the need for a gut-based personal decision.

And, in such times, I have found 3 things to be very helpful –

1. Create space from the noise. Shift to a different location and spend some time alone. Or, spend time with people with whom you’re very comfortable in silence. It is only in space can we really listen to ourselves.
2. Get some sleep. This sounds like an extremely counter intuitive thing to do when you have to make a difficult decision. My guess is that the scientific reasons for this approach is that sleep refuels our willpower. And, our willpower helps us make better decisions. There is also some scientific merit to the idea of subconscious information processing. Go to sleep with a complicated problem and sleep can, every once in a while, clear our heads. However, the reason I recommend it is that it has simply worked incredibly well for me. I’ve also a few life experiences that have taught me never to trust my judgment (or others’ for that matter) when sleep deprived.
3. Share your decision with a few people who understand you. This is just to watch out for any red flags. The folks who really understand will warn you if the decision makes no sense. And, that check point is very helpful.

Peeple, an app that allows you to rate other people (“Yelp for Humans”), received a lot of press attention yesterday. As the app hasn’t launched yet, it is unclear if the app will take off. If the attention it has received is anything to go by, it is sure to see some initial demand.

It shouldn’t be surprising to see an app of this nature. After all, nearly every organization or system we interact with is rated on the Tripadvisors and Yelps of the world. The risk is that this could end up being an app that facilitates a lot of abuse. So, I’m curious to see how the founders build this product.

That said, the more pertinent point is that apps like this will only further increase the “chatter.” Thanks to Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, we’re all, every once a while, both media outlets and news-worthy personalities. Things we do can receive a lot of attention. So much so that we can spend more time surveying the attention we (and others) get than actually building something worthwhile.

The chatter is unquestionably distracting and counter productive. It is impossible to focus on creation if all we do is listen for feedback. So, repeatedly asking ourselves the questions – “what are you working to build?” and “what is the next step to make progress?” – has become more important than ever before.

The 2 most common questions asked by the business press –

1. What works?
2. And, what doesn’t?

The press then picks out practices from successful/unsuccessful companies from time-to-time and attempts to answer these questions. We then get a list of practices that we place into one of the two categories. These lists are akin to fashion trends – depending on the time of year, it is either cool to do open offices or not, cool to work remotely or not, etc.

They are, however, the wrong questions. The next time you find yourself asking these questions, it is worth swapping them with 2 others –
1. What worked or didn’t work in this situation or context?
2. Can we abstract from the specific situation to general principles that could be applicable to the general population or, at least, to a significant subset of the population?

These questions are much harder to answer. They might also not take us anywhere. But, that’s the point.

It is hard to get to real insight.