Category: Everything else

George Ezra

Young musician George Ezra grew up in a family of avid singers. His siblings, however, had better voices growing up. One day, he stumbled onto a label by American folk singer William Ledbetter “Lead Belly.” On the back of the CD, it said – “his voice was so big that you had to turn the record down.”

So, George, in a moment of inspiration, decided to try out a big voice.

It worked. And he never looked back. One small leap and his life changed for ever.

There’s no guarantee that we’ll have our George Ezra moment when we leap next. But, leap enough, and it’ll likely show up.

I, for one, am glad he took that leap and gave it a go. We wouldn’t have had “Budapest” if he didn’t.. :-)

Surviving Pune

I love swimming when I have the opportunity. But, every time I walk to the pool to swim and first touch the water, the resistance shows up and exaggerates the feeling of discomfort. Even though I’ve learnt that I’ll get comfortable within 10 seconds of actually swimming, I’m amazed as to how my mind does such a poor job of predicting my eventual happiness. This is especially hard if the pool isn’t deep – it works much easier if I can just jump in.

But, a tactic that works incredibly well is to remember my experience jumping into much colder water in much cooler weather when I was on a 3 month project in Pune, India. Having survived Pune (and learnt a few lessons in the process), it becomes much easier to sign up for the ride. After all, if I’ve survived worse, how bad can this be?

The lesson I’ve learnt from this is the sheer value of hard knocks, failures and bad experiences. When you put yourself out there and attempt to do/change things, you inevitably go through difficult experiences. And, these experiences, especially the really difficult ones, greatly improve your ability to persist and persevere through other experiences. They also make it easier to keep perspective when things go wrong – you survived “Pune” after all.

We aren’t born with grit and happiness written on our birth certificate. The good stuff is always hard earned.

Selling 22,200 girl scout cookies

13 year old Katie Francis sold 21,477 girl scout cookies this year and broke the world record. The New York Times has captured a few hard earned lessons that Katie’s learned over these years – this wasn’t her first time selling girl scout cookies, of course. She’s accumulated considerable skill attempting to break the record every year and is probably in the top 0.1% of hard working 13 year olds.

With stories like this, I’m always curious as to how much of the motivation came from factors like parents and the environment and how much came from her own self. I suspect it must have been ignited by external factors when she started and then taken on a life of its own thanks to intrinsic energy and drive.

Katie’s become a superstar and is now doing speaking gigs at sales conferences. Good for her. I’m hopeful she’ll retain the spark as she grows up.

And, just for today, I wanted to draw attention to one lesson she shared – ‘Don’t waste time convincing the naysayers. Move on and find the yesses.’

Great advice.

Happiness is not a station we arrive at

It is a manner of traveling.

And, every once a while, we need to drown out all the noise to understand our manner of choice. Our manner of traveling won’t work with every person in every environment.

But, that’s why happiness is described as either a “journey,” “pursuit” or “search” – it is all of that. And, it is up to us.

Distinctly un-cool

A butterfly’s lifecycle is a great example of the lifecycle of something cool.

Source: Milkweed for Monarchs

You go through many stages that look distinctly un-cool until something beautiful appears.

Behind any kind of greatness lies years spent in activities that are distinctly un-cool at the time – days spent in self doubt, weekends spent working on that dream, and years spent in lonely practice. There is no guarantee that these efforts will lead to the desired rewards. Sometimes it all works out. And, sometimes it doesn’t.

And, even when it doesn’t, it is just the desired reward that doesn’t work out. What follows whole-hearted effort are character, happiness, and a persistent spirit that moves onto working on the next thing.

The best thing about those riches is that they’re eternal..

Amazon pop up stores and retail

I saw this at a mall close by last weekend. I’d read about Amazon opening up pop up stores in a couple of locations but I hadn’t seen one myself.

Amazon Pop up

The question in the mind of anyone who is interested in Amazon is – is this a sign of Amazon’s commitment to physical retail? My hunch is that it isn’t clear anyone, including Jeff Bezos, knows for sure. Amazon’s growth has been nothing short of stunning. However, of late, that growth, especially in retail, has slowed. And, it is clear that the retail behemoth is looking for ways to continue accelerating the growth. However, online retail as a percentage of physical retail has been hovering at the 10% mark for a couple of years now – this means 9/10 retail purchases are still made offline. And, Amazon definitely wants in. Or, does it?

The downside for Amazon is that it’ll lose a significant part of its cost efficiency if it takes the plunge into retail. But, on the other hand, it might help Amazon make its 1 hour delivery ambitions real. It all depends on how retail shakes out.

Retail, in the past, was pretty much physical. Aside from a few niche services that allowed you to call and order, you had to show up at a store and buy things. Thanks to the internet, we saw players like Amazon run e-commerce stores that did not have a retail presence. Over time, 10% of shopping in North America has shifted to e-commerce. This proportion will undoubtedly increase, but, it isn’t clear by how much. There are, after all, many who actually enjoy the physical shopping experience. In the last few years, Europe, and more recently the US, has experienced a rise of the hybrid experience – order online and pick up at store. If retail stores still stock a reasonable selection, this has a best-of-both-worlds effect as it enables shoppers to save time on the essentials by having them pre-ordered, packaged and ready and leaves them to enjoy the pleasure of shopping. It also saves money for the retailers as they can enjoy the savings due to scale.

All of this leads to the big question – what does retail look like in the future? I think, in 10 years, we will see –
1. 30% physical/traditional
2. 30% online
3. 40% hybrid

I don’t believe physical retail will ever go away. I just think the experience will need to be differentiated and unique so it caters to those who really enjoy the physical retail experience. It’ll also mean we’ll see physical do well in goods that are unique – e.g. clothes (think Bonobos) – and no longer need to worry about choosing a bottle of vinegar from 73 options. I think online will continue to grow but I think there are too many advantages for the hybrid model not to work.

So, if I were Amazon, I’d double down on the pop up store test. This could be key to whether they’ll thrive as a retailer. (Note: the key word is retailer. I am bullish on Amazon thriving as a company as long as Bezos is leading it)

The small things

If you see someone come in to a non critical meeting prepared and with an agenda, take notice.

There are many who brush away the “small things” because they’re saving themselves for the “big things.”

Why bother showing up on time for a meeting at school? I’ll do that at work.
Why bother keeping up my promises with my peers? I’ll do that when my boss asks me to.
Why bother? I’ll do that when I have to.

Many of these folk do actually bring their A game when they have to or when the big boss asks them to.

But, the way life works, very few meetings or opportunities come with the right labels. Very often, it is the small meetings and interactions that lead to the big meetings and interactions.

Watch for how we approach the small things. Because, it is the small things that become the big things.

Huger mistakes and better processes

I make mistakes like the next man. In fact, being–forgive me–rather cleverer than most men, my mistakes tend to be correspondingly huger. | Albus Dumbledore

As we grow older, and hopefully smarter and wiser, our mistakes generally become bigger. We may make fewer mistakes but the stakes are generally much higher than they used to be. That’s part of the natural growth process. Sometimes, this process is accelerated – as in the case with young entrepreneurs who’ve created successful companies and find themselves making huge mistakes – and sometimes, it happens slowly. But, if you’re learning, growing and doing more, it generally happens nevertheless. Bad judgment -> mistakes -> experience -> good judgment.

The response when we make such mistakes should not be to attempt to avoid them. Instead, it should be to check if our processes are better today than they were yesterday. Here are a couple of examples –

Example 1 (good) – when I went on school trips as a kid, a loss of possessions was guaranteed. I’ve lost many clothes and shoes on these trips. Over time, I’ve learnt that I’m pretty careful with others’ possessions but tend to be careless with my own. I’ve also learnt to be aware of this and modify my processes. So, today, as I finished up a camping trip, I actually double checked our tent to make sure I didn’t leave anything behind.
Does this mean I’m going to stop losing stuff? Absolutely not. I misplaced a water bottle just a week ago, after all. But, the processes are getting better and I hope to lose less stuff in the future.

Example 2 (not good) – I bought a $25 extra protective sole for my shoe last weekend and promptly threw the receipt and the box. It seemed to work fine at the store but the daily reality was that it wasn’t right. And, unfortunately, I can’t return it without a receipt or a box. That’s $25 I will never see again. This, however, is a mistake that I kicked myself for – in my ongoing attempts to keep clutter out of life, I’ve disposed off receipts too quickly in the past. And, yet, I haven’t quite learnt – a perfect example of a bad process. A moment’s thought made me realize that I could easily have taken a quick photo on my phone and then disposed the receipt.

Lesson hopefully learnt and process hopefully improved.

The mistakes will keep coming and will continue to get bigger. But, the goal with examining processes is to make sure we make newer, better mistakes and learn from them. With every mistake, we can get better. Like all good things in life, the choice is ours.

The energy rule

There are some people and environments that give us positive energy. And, there are some people and environments that unfailingly manage to suck our energy.

If we have no choice but to spend time with the latter, we need to learn to interact with a complete lack of attachment and be “matchers” rather than “givers.” When we become matchers, we only give as much as we get.

Also, there’s a chance that someone who was a source of a ton of positive energy once no longer is. That happens, sadly.

The first step is to be aware and to identify the difference.

Then, when given a choice, spend time with the former. And, when doing so, work on building a life where we can do more of that.

Making policy decisions

A big part of being a good decision maker is learning how to make good policy decisions. Good policy decisions have, among other things, two attributes –

1. They understand the downstream consequences. You don’t create policy for the short term. So, policy makers spend time thinking about the downstream consequences.
2. They minimize exceptions. In doing so, decision making in the future can go on auto pilot.

As a simple example – a friend once asked me to share a list of the best books I read. So, I put the list down in a word document and sent it. Another friend then asked me for the list with a few notes on the books I recommended. A few months later, I got a similar request from another friend. Every time I got one of these requests, I groaned. Sometimes, I did justice and gave them what they wanted and, other times, I just forwarded them an older version of the list.

It only hit me a few months later that I’d be better off with a system solution. That’s how my book review blog was born. It made sense as it was one of those decisions that had very good downstream consequences. And, most importantly, it put all book recommendation requests on auto pilot.

This isn’t an easy thing to do, however. And, I find myself forgetting to do this regularly. But, if done well, it can help us become better decision makers.

So, every time you have a decision to make, don’t just make the decision. Instead, ask yourself how you should approach the decision by asking yourself how you would treat similar requests. Then, create a system/policy for similar kinds of decisions. Sometimes, all it takes is an extra minute of thought. That extra minute can save a lot of time downstream..