Category: Everything else

The like-respect conundrum

I find that, if you aim to be liked, you’ll often end up making one too many compromises on your core values to be respected.

The other option is to choose to accept the fact that you might be respected and not liked. This is a hard choice to make because the prospect of universal popularity is very seductive. But, in doing so, you’ll make sure you never compromise on the things that matter and, in doing so, do work that matters to you.

Funnily enough, that generally means you will actually be liked by the people who choose to spend time with you. Sure, it is not universal popularity. But, I’d argue that it is the sort of popularity that actually matters. Our happiness is a by-product of the ten people we spend most of our time with.

What changes and what doesn’t

It was a Sunday evening. I had a yellow table lamp on and put on a beautiful series of songs on my speakers and sat on the couch.

I realized that there are many things that have changed in the last few years. But, at the same time, so many things just haven’t.

15 or so years ago, 100 of us went on a weekend school trip to an amusement park that specializes in water rides. I’d still rank the day spent in that park as among the best in my life. We just had an incredible amount of fun through the day. Just imagine 50 pre-teen boys darting around a water park. At the end of the day, I remember feeling really tired, sitting with a few close friends on the train back home and listening to a a couple of songs on our walkman (remember them?). That moment felt special.

I thought of the little things that have stayed special over these years.

Relaxing in the evening listening to great music. That’s special.
Add a great conversation with a few friends to the mix. That’s even better.
A trip with close friends. Just awesome.

Would this change if I had a few extra 0s on my bank account? Would this change if I achieved incredible professional success?

Absolutely not. Sure, money matters – I’m not debating that. But, beyond a point, there are all these things that either don’t require much money or just can’t be bought.

It helps to make sure we remind ourselves of what they are. And, to collect moments like these. It is easy to be caught up in our plans to do this and that in our lifetimes and to make sure we have no dearth of financial success.

But, in the end, it is these moments that are going to matter.. because, when we’re at an age when we have more money than we know what to do with, all that will really remain are those memories.

Compounding learning

Compound interest is the single most important concept in finance. Time value of money, as an idea, comes close. But, understand compound interest and it’ll change the way you think about saving money for the future. The simple notion behind compound interest is that you earn interest on your interest. This means small amounts invested today that get compounded over time earn a lot more in the long run than large amounts compounded less. It is powerful stuff.

I’d like to make the argument that learning works in exactly the same way.

Let’s imagine you come to me and say – “Hey, I’m going to read a non-fiction book for 10 minutes every day on an interesting subject.”

Great. Do we expect a difference between your understanding of the world and mine tomorrow? Probably not.

Day after? Again, probably not.

But, what about a year from now? Sure, there is likely to be a difference thanks to the accumulated knowledge of 3650 minutes of reading.

What about 10 years from now? Now, there is sure to be a difference. You’ve clocked 36,500 minutes of reading.

Then, what about 30 years?

Little actions carried out consistently over time can have tremendous power. You and I know that. But, learning is a different monster. In that first year, you probably just accumulated a vast amount of knowledge. But, fast forward a few years and that knowledge soon becomes understanding. As you read an interesting mix of topics, you soon begin to realize that science, art, management, psychology, leadership, self-help all become interrelated. You begin to see patterns and links. It is a deep understanding of these links that gives us wisdom. Wisdom is simply an extension of that understanding – it is knowing what to do with all this knowledge in the context of daily life. And, we know that it is one thing to be knowledgeable but it is quite another to be wise.

This is why we see a tremendous difference between people’s wealth, success, happiness and energy as they age. For most of the population, education ends when they finish schooling. But, for the folks who take it upon themselves to learn with greater vigor once formal learning is complete, the effect of their learning over time compounds. Put it simply, if Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates read an interesting book on human behavior right now, they’d get a LOT more value out of it than you and I. That’s because they have so many interesting mental models that allow them to test findings and incorporate learnings. It is these mental models that differentiates masters/learning machines and everyone else. 

Every single day, we have a choice, both with money and with learning, to use the power of compounding or not. Not being aware of the choice is not an excuse. And, not choose is, really, choosing..

Fear, duty or inspiration

There are 3 broad ways to motivate people – fear, duty or inspiration. Each comes with a different narrative –

Fear – “If you don’t do the job, I will… ” – there is typically at least a small degree of bullying involved in this method and works best when you have the power to coerce or when the people you are leading are naive or uneducated.

Duty – “You get paid to do this” – duty is what keeps most city trains full at 8am. This is the most passive form of leadership of the three as you don’t really need to do much. Most of us have an intrinsic sense of duty and a need to be fair.

Inspiration – “Everything we do here has a purpose and we’re building something great” – this is the hardest of the lot. The reason this is incredibly hard is because it requires you, as the leader, to be continuously inspired. And, it also requires you to design and reinforce systems that celebrate and encourage people.

There is no right or wrong style in most cases. I’ve just observed the following –
1. Outstanding organizations are built around inspiration. You don’t need to be a shout-off-the-rooftops leader to be inspiring. There are many in Microsoft who would say Bill Gates was many times more inspiring than Steve Ballmer.

2. You will have a personal preference for one of these styles. Inspiration, for example, doesn’t work for everyone. Just make sure you build teams that work with your style. And, similarly, make sure you join teams that are aligned to your style preference. Style mismatches never end well.

3. Inspiration comes easiest when what you do is aligned with who you are and why you do things. When that happens, you don’t have to try to be inspired – your integrity alone will inspire. The word ‘integrity’ comes from the word ‘integer’ and means “whole.” When it feels consistent, it shows.

The double whammy principle

Let’s imagine 2 situations –
– You have an important interview tomorrow and are trying to get through as much of the preparation as possible
– You are going through an incredibly busy time and there just doesn’t seem to be enough time in the day to do the things you want to do

In both situations, you could justify an impulse to stop doing one or more of the following “basic” things – sleeping, eating healthy, or taking time to stay organized.

This is where the double whammy principle comes in – The return-on-investment of the “basic” things in our life goes up exponentially in times when doing them feels against the flow. Essentially, not doing them will feel like a double whammy.

So, even if you did pull that all-nighter for your interview and went a bit more prepared, your lack of sleep will ensure you don’t perform to the best of your ability. And, if you did compromise on taking the time to organize yourself before or during a crazy day, there is a very high probability you will lose a lot more time due to the disorganization and lack of planning.

So, what does that mean for you? Very simply, avoid the double whammy. The busier you feel, the more important it is to carve out time for the basic things in your life. In tough times, the time taken to sleep, eat healthy, to reflect and to stay organized will pay themselves forward many times over.

Starting ahead

I noticed something interesting in the way I approach the morning. If I’m up by around 5:30, I feel calm and ahead of the day. But, if I’m up around 6, I already feel behind and somewhat rushed.

I’ve been sensing this pattern of late but can definitely attest to it as of this morning. There’s a tipping point around the 5:30 mark that has a noticeable effect on my morning. And, it feels like a worthy enough tipping point to design around it, i.e., to make sure my alarms go off no later than 5:30. This, in turn, means being in bed by 9:30.

I find it fascinating to learn these little things about yourself.

This is also why I believe blanket productivity advice is useless. It is much better to explore productivity from a more overarching point of view – start from exploring what “the good life” means to you, understand what you value, what your ideal days would be like, how you’d like to work – and then work backwards to create an approach towards productivity. Once you have that baseline, it will still require a continuous chain of iterations as you reflect and learn more about yourself.

But, the fact remains that there is no productivity without a goal and there is no way you can approach the “how” behind productivity without understanding the psychology behind it. And, productivity goals and your mind’s psychology are uniquely yours. It helps to own it.

Art in human interactions

Art in human interactions is knowing when to ignore the science. There’s plenty of science out there that can tell you how to “win friends and influence people.” But, art is understanding what and when to ignore the science.

There are 3 pre-requisites that help us become artists –
1. An acceptance that universal popularity is a myth. This leads to a degree of comfort in just being ourselves.
2. Taking time to learn the science and understand human psychology and human behavior. Wisdom typically follows knowledge.
3. Developing the habit to be present when we interact and to take the time to reflect after interactions. That’s how we learn from our experiences.

There have been many great books written about influence and persuasion that have inspired courses in schools around the world. That’s great – it helps us understand the science. But, approaching human beings as scientific puzzles that need to be solved is one of the worst long term moves we can make. In the really long term, a purity of intent matters more than anything science can offer. That can only come with a genuine interest in understanding people and in building long term relationships.

Human interactions and relationship building isn’t a short term cash-and-carry game. There is a term for that game – networking. It doesn’t work in the long run.

No getting around focus

We’re all on a spectrum between obsessive compulsive and attention deficit. I am definitely firmly in the attention deficit side. We didn’t have too much testing for all of this when I was growing up in India so you just learnt to live with it. I am sure I’d have a dose of the hyperactive ‘H’ as well.

Ever since understanding this, I’ve designed my life around these characteristics. For instance, it used to really annoy me that I would never be able to hold my attention through an entire class when I’d observe friends around me do it with ease. It used to also annoy me that I could never get through an online tutorial or read a rule book. Now, I’m more tolerant to these quirks and don’t mind them as long as I’m aware of what’s happening. I don’t read rule books or watch online tutorials if I can help it. I listen to books more often than I read them. I prefer asking for directions rather than reading maps and I definitely expect myself to get distracted every few minutes. I treat that as completely normal and expect work sessions to be littered with lots of small breaks. I do email breaks and kill two birds with one stone. I banned Facebook feed breaks in April 2013 and have managed to stick to that ban – the Facebook feed is too much of a rabbit hole for someone like me. :-)

However, as I’ve been working hard on getting to my ideal life process (sleep, eat, exercise, read, meditate, be incredibly productive and reflect – consistently), I’ve realized there’s no getting around focus. And, here it is important to understand focus, both as a noun and as a verb.

Focus as a noun. Focus as a noun is our normal vision of focus – think someone bent over a library book for hours. This is hard when you are wired to be distracted. But, on the plus side, I’ve realized that folks like me tend to have speed on our side. I think our brains realize that the time we spend focused on something is precious and it aims to compensate for the distractions with increased intensity. In short, if you pay attention and work on this, distractions become no big deal. You learn to harness them productively.

Focus as a verb. This is where the magic lies. Focus as a verb is an intensive, dynamic and iterative process. Focus as a verb is when you understand your big directional goals, are deeply committed to them, and are going to leave no stone un-turned to get to them. This involves a relentless pursuit of the things that matter. It requires constant reflection to make sure you’re doing the right things and a mindset that just refuses to give up despite the many challenges you are to face. It is an overarching idea that governs your life. This is what obsessive leaders like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos have in spades.

The easier way to think about these 2 kinds of focus is to think of them as analogous to management and leadership. Management is getting things done efficiently while leadership is doing the right things in the first place. Once we learn to manage ourselves, focus as a noun becomes easy to deal with. The hard part is the focus as a verb. That’s where we prove our mettle as leaders of our own selves. That’s where the magic happens.

And, there is no getting around it.

Hat tip to Greg McKeown for the focus as a noun and verb insight

Ser Allister Thorne on leadership

My wife and I caught up with the 4th season of ‘A Game of Thrones’ over the past few days as it is finally available on the iTunes store. This would normally lead to a few rants about HBO’s antiquated approach to content distribution online. But, not today.

In one of the (many) war scenes in the season, Ser Allister Thorne says this to Jon Snow –

“Do you know what leadership means, Lord Snow? It means that the person in charge gets second guessed by every clever little twat with a mouth. But if he starts second guessing himself, that’s the end. For him, for the clever little twats, for everyone.”

As much as I despise Thorne’s character, I thought this observation on leadership was particularly insightful.

I’ve observed this over and over again. The idea “often mistaken, but never in doubt” is regularly used in jest. But, it is one of those characteristics that I find to be essential in leadership. No matter what you do, you’re always going to be second guessed. Yes, sure, an ability to listen to reason and change course matters. But, if you’ve just set sail, the right course is almost never clear. More often than not, conviction and self-belief matter more.

And, I’m not just talking about leading teams. This applies just as well to just leading ourselves..

The perfect spaghetti sauce

What is the perfect spaghetti sauce? How spicy, salty, or thick would the perfect spaghetti sauce be?

Howard Moskowitz’s breakthrough insight here was that there is no perfect spaghetti sauce. Instead, there are many different kinds of perfect spaghetti sauce that suit different kinds of people. Starbucks wouldn’t exist if there was a perfect cup of coffee. And, Earl Grey certainly isn’t everyone’s favorite cup of tea.

The best products, services, and businesses don’t attempt to be everything to everybody. There’s a simple and important reason for this – the best products stand for something. The moment they make that choice, they lose people who don’t agree with what they stand for. A multi-millionaire may scorn Ikea’s philosophy but, for every one of those, you’ll find ten 20-somethings who will swear by it. That’s part of the game. You can’t win them all. In fact, I’d go far as to say you don’t really want to win them all.

It is much the same for us as people. If we attempt universal popularity, we will almost certainly lose what we stand for. Unlike in the case of a product or service, that means more to us than a decline in sales. It is the difference between a life and a life well lived.

The stakes are much higher. Forget about choosing wisely. First, we must choose.