Category: Everything else

Reflect on it and then you will be done

Reflection is sometimes sold as a “do-it-once-in-a-while-and-you-will-be-fine” thing. Structures in organizations emphasize that as well – quarterly earnings, yearly performance reviews, etc.

The reality is that it works something like this – Have an idea -> Reflect -> Do something -> Reflect -> See outcome -> Reflect -> Tweak your idea -> Reflect -> Try again -> Reflect -> See outcome this time -> Reflect.

As long as you are attempting things, reflection is what ensures you are learning from the process.

reflect, learn

Reflection, nearly always, makes you realize you are inadequate. The point of reflection isn’t to feel good. The point of reflection is to learn. And, getting comfortable with feeling inadequate is the first step to learning.

There hasn’t yet been an exercise coach who has found ways to make people fitter without having them experience pain.

The parable of the wind and the sun

A few incidents had me talking about the effects of kindness over force to a wiser friend. She remarked that our discussion reminded her of the parable of the wind and the sun. Ever since we had that conversation, the parable has popped into my head as I reflected on a couple of places where I stumbled recently. Here is the story – thank you Bartleby.com.

The Wind and the Sun were disputing which was the stronger. Suddenly, they saw a traveler coming down the road, and the Sun said: “I see a way to decide our dispute. Whichever of us can cause that traveler to take off his cloak shall be regarded as the stronger. You begin.”

So, the Sun retired behind a cloud, and the Wind began to blow as hard as it could upon the traveler. But, the harder he blew, the more closely did the traveler wrap his cloak round him, till at last the Wind had to give up in despair.

The Sun, then, came out and shone in all his glory upon the traveler, who soon found it too hot to walk with his cloak on.

wind and the sun, pressure, kindness, severity

Moral of the story: “Kindness affects more than severity.”

This is an example I know to be true and one that I remember very clearly. However, in Hogan’s terms, people who have “Boldness” as a defining characteristic tend to default to arrogance and aggressiveness under pressure. So, as I recently discovered, I have remembered this in the good times and completely forgotten this when under pressure.

A great lesson – one that I definitely need to do better at.

Added note: I am reminded of the quote – “When you want to fight fire with fire, remember that the fire department uses water.” :-)

The tour guide at Giza

Does the tour guide at the Pyramids of Giza truly appreciate its beauty? Or, is it just a daily chore that helps him/her earn a living?

Giza

For most tour guides, I am guessing it is likely the latter. The small fraction who’ve still manage to maintain child like wonder are likely to be the exceptional tour guides you’d want to travel with.

It is hard to keep perspective of greatness if we are exposed to it every day. Or, in other words, awesome things can cease to be awesome in our minds pretty quickly if we let them.

Just for today, let us be that exceptional tour guide and keep an eye out for the greatness that we regularly take for granted.

The short straw

We were recently in passport control on our way back to the states. As we were in transit at the airport, we had transit passengers from various other flights and one of them seemed to be a flight heading back the UK. As per usual, passport control for non-citizens, non-ESTA countries (effectively Europe) was under staffed. We weren’t clear why the Brits weren’t on the ESTA queue. But, stuck in our queue, we heard one annoyed British accented voice after another complain about how preposterous the wait was. Some even called friends and family to tell them how ridiculous this was.

My wife and I found this all pretty amusing for two reasons. First, British passport control is actually among the most unfriendly to anyone who isn’t white skinned (even if the officers are a diverse mix). Often, they make you sorry for having taken a tourist trip to see their country. And, they take incredibly long, too. A below average wait at Heathrow if you are Asian/African is an hour. I once waited 3 hours at passport control after a 2.5 hour flight. That’s right – my travel time was shorter than my wait at passport control.

Second, none of the others on the queue yesterday had anything to say at the wait. It was just another day, just another flight. Wait 1 hour? No problem. At least it is not a pat down. Made to feel unwanted when visiting another country? That’s just business-as-usual.

The good news is that drawing the short straw every time for arbitrary reasons – i.e. birth and the color of your skin – helps you keep perspective when you face what should only be (for your own sanity at least) minor annoyances.

short straw

I know what I need to do

I know what I need to do. It is going to be painful, hard and, truth be told, the resistance is screaming in my ear asking me to figure out ways to avoid it.

There are definitely ways to avoid it.

I can choose to ask many people for their advice and choose to listen to someone who shines light on an easier path.

I can choose to make a list and just begin working on other projects – never mind their priorities.

I can choose to listen to the resistance, complain and find ingenious ways to procrastinate.

Or, I can just suck it up and do it. Like most times, when I listen carefully to myself, I know exactly what I need to do and how it needs to be done. Perhaps, instead of attempting to figure out escape routes, I should just realize that the high anticipated pain and the strength of the opposition from the resistance provide the strongest clue that this is exactly the obstacle that needs to be overcome.

The obstacle is, almost always, the way.

resistance

The Chief of Staff

A close friend recommended the TV show “The West Wing” to us. We’re twelve episodes in and are loving it. The show is incredibly well written (thanks Aaron sorkin) and keeps you entertained on story, screenplay and dialog alone.

An incredible scene at the end of a recent episode has the President in conversation with the Agricultural Secretary as he’s leaving for “The State of the Union” address. The Agricultural Secretary is the person who is chosen to take charge in case there’s a disaster. The President gives him two minutes of advice of what he should do in case the worst happens. Then, he asks –

“Have you got a best friend?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Is he smarter than you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Would you trust him with your life?”
“Yes, sir”
“That’s your Chief of Staff.”

It is an incredible scene because you see a wonderfully deep relationship between the President and his Chief of Staff. And, this dialog brings it all together.

The Godfather made the adage – “It’s not personal, it’s just business” popular. I think that is a sad way to approach the work we do. We often spend more time with folks we work than we do with our own families. And, many of my closest friends have come from the teams I’ve worked on.

In reality, it is business AND it is personal.

No pie charts

“Never use a pie chart.” – said one of my favorite senior consultants with a lot of passion. “For every case where you might want to use a pie chart, there is a better chart out there.”

With more data present than ever before, understanding how to visualize data is a useful skill. To that end, I thought I’d share a “chart suggestions thought starter” infographic. Most of it is common sense.

But, as you and I have likely experienced and been guilty of ourselves, common sense is not common practice.

chart-suggestions, data visualization, pie chartsThank you to the team at Extreme Presentation Method

Basic Income Guarantee

The reason hard real world problems are hard to solve is because the causes of real world problems are not simple to understand. What causes poverty, for example? If someone tells you there is one simple solution to the problem, you can be certain that person has gotten it wrong.

That said, with a bit of thought, we will likely be able to identify a few likely causes. But, identifying a lack of education as a cause for poverty only takes us so far. Bringing quality education to low income regions requires better infrastructure, better teachers and a general improvement in out-of-school lifestyle. Hard problems are hard for good reason.

Brussels was bombed thrice today – there is likely a strong link between these bombings and the attacks in Paris as the people behind the Paris attacks were known to have grown up in Brussels. Like poverty, a problem such as terrorism has multiple causes. We can be certain, however, that low household income is a cause. Poverty and crime tend to go together.

Over the past few years, we’ve been hearing increased agitation around the subject of income inequality. The various “occupy” protests from a few years back were a result of that agitation. These aren’t going away. Donald Trump owes much of his success so far to the pent up anger in American society around the unequal distribution of wealth. Thomas Pikkety’s famous book on economics effectively demonstrated that, left to a natural flow of events, inequality only gets worse in society. The reason previous centuries have escaped this problem is because of regular war (a costly escape but an escape nonetheless) – one of the best redistributors of wealth. However, in a society that is as peaceful, on average, as ours today, this problem is likely not going away soon.

Compounding these issues is the sheer speed at which technology is progressing. AlphaGo was supposed to have the capability of beating a top human Go player in ten years. This means jobs that we expected computers to replace 10 years from now will likely be replaced in five. A recent White House report to the US Congress estimated that there was an 83% chance that a worker earning less than $20 per hour will eventually lose their job to a machine. I think the probability is at a 100%.

All of this brings me to the central thesis of the post – there is a need for conversations to be had about the possibility of a “Basic Income Guarantee.” This scenario involves decoupling income from work and working toward redistributing wealth across society. Of course, the solution isn’t to approach this as the only solution. But, it is important to acknowledge that this is a possible solution and important that we at least begin to have discussions on conducting experiments in select geographies to see how it might work.

The combination of poverty, unequal distribution of wealth and technological progress will not make for pretty viewing in ten years. This is not a hard problem as much as it is a combination of many hard problems. As the article by Scott Santens that inspired this post nicely said, ignoring these problems will be tantamount to the laughable “duck and cover” strategies to avoiding nuclear blasts during the cold war.

Brevity isn’t all that important

The smartphone obsessed reader would have you believe that brevity is what defines good writing. More than a paragraph? You must really suck as a writer. One scroll is all the attention a reader will give you before they move to the next thing.

Here are five things I’d take over brevity –

1. Useful
2. Inspiring
3. Thoughtful
4. Memorable
5. Clear

Brevity matters, sure. I’d love for what is written to be as short as possible. However, if it means becoming less thoughtful or less useful, I’d prefer the long version – thank you very much.

—
Inspired by David Heinemeier Hansson’s excellent post – “Simple just isn’t that important.”

The 35k lesson

Every time I look back at a painful experience, I attempt to re-frame it by asking myself what lessons I learnt from that experience?

There was one such experience for which I paid what was effectively “tuition” of thirty five thousand dollars – a massive amount. For a long while, I was annoyed at what led to that experience. But, once I passed it through the re-framing filter, I realized that the most important lesson I’d learnt from that experience was one about emotional intelligence.

I was listening to “Mastery” by Robert Greene during that period and I distinctly remember the moment Greene spoke about emotional intelligence as (paraphrased) the ability to ignore what people say and, instead, to listen to what they do. In listening to what they do, he asked us to pay careful attention to their behavior when the chips were down, how they behaved when they thought no one was watching, their choice of partners, etc. It was one of those moments of clarity for me. I finally realized what I was meant to learn from thirty five thousand dollar experience.

A few days ago, I wrote about the idea that “falling is guaranteed.” The flip side of that idea is that, as you take bigger risks, some of those falls become rather painful. You might break a metaphorical bone and pay the tuition for that experience – this can be money, burnt relationships, dents in your confidence or a sense of discomfort when you think about it. As you pay this tuition, it is tempting to want to block this experience off entirely and not think about it. But, my experience has taught me that there is a lot to be gained from wading in within that discomfort and pain and really extracting the value from the tuition paid. My emotional intelligence fall came with scars. I live with them everyday. But, I look at them now not with disgust, but with gratitude for what they taught me.

The saying – “Success comes from good judgement. Good judgment comes experience. Experience comes from bad judgment” – holds absolutely true. The part that is missing is that the experience follows only after careful reflection and analysis of our errors in judgment.

That process is painful and uncomfortable, but worth it.

experience, lesson