Category: Everything else

Wired to compete

Homo sapiens have been on earth for about 200,000 years. For 199,950 (99.9%) of those years, most of the human population wasn’t assured easy access to food. We’ve been hard-wired to compete for survival. That instinct to compete translates into everything else we do.

But, you know what? We don’t need to compete any more. A large proportion of us don’t need to fight everyone else for food and survival. We don’t really need to compete for any of the basic needs on Maslow’s hierarchy. Instead, the questions we have in front of us are –
– How can we make sure the rest of the human population have the basics in place – food, shelter, access to clean water, education, etc.?
– How can we be happy?

The second question is the tough one. Our instinct to compete combined with the many opportunities out there directs our focus to “the chase.” “The chase” is a metaphor for whatever is sought after in societal terms. It is easy to spend our time in “the chase” because it is extrinsic. As long as our struggles are extrinsic, we can focus on appeasing our insecurities and circumvent any questions around happiness.

But, that question is going to keep coming back. If it isn’t clear yet, there’s enough out there for us. We just have to be willing to get to know ourselves, understand what we really want, and keep our eyes open for opportunities. This isn’t about what’s out there. It is about what’s in here. We need less competition, less insecurities, and less frantic activity. Instead, we need more calm, more confidence, and more wisdom.

The challenge is that all of this goes against our wiring. Perhaps that is the biggest challenge that awaits our generation.

The first step to surgical precision

The first step to surgical precision is a plan. The plan might change depending on what the surgeon sees when he operates. But, he’s going to have a defined plan nevertheless.

It is like a general going to war. As they say, no battle plans survive first contact with the enemy. That doesn’t mean great generals didn’t make them. They just adapted their plans depending on the situation.

I just read a nice quote that said –

‘Nobody ever wrote down a plan to be fat, lazy, broke, or stupid. Those things are what happen when you don’t have a plan. ‘| Larry Winger

Having a plan doesn’t guarantee that it’ll all work out. But, not having one really messes your chances.

So, improve your chances. Start with a plan. When things change, adapt your plan. Get everything that is in your control sorted – that’s how we get to surgical precision. So, take a few seconds today and.. plan. There is power in just being intentional.

(And, yes, “plan” was intentionally repeated. :-))

Toyota experiments and Intuit – The 200 words project

Here’s this week’s 200 word idea thanks to Fastcompany.com.

How can a loom maker located in the Kansas of Japan decide to go into the car business after everyone else and become better than GM and Mercedes in the core business of making cars? Why is it that when Nissan sells a hybrid, it’s got Toyota parts in it?

Even as a student, Intuit founder Scott Cook was fascinated by Toyota. Along with his professors at Harvard, he went to the Toyota factories and observed Toyota’s approach to manufacturing. And, one of his professors pointed out that Toyota ran itself as a massive series of experiments from the production line worker to the CEO. They had the line supervisor teach 70 or 80 people how to run experiments with their team – little scientific single variable experiments to try out their ideas on how to improve production. He later saw the same dynamic repeat itself at Google.

Scott Cook concluded that the reason big companies with insanely smart people made bad decisions was because they relied on the 3 P’s of politics, persuasion and PowerPoint instead of experimentation. He was so inspired by Toyota that “leadership by experimentation” became at the center of his leadership style at Intuit

Leadership by experimentationSource and thanks to: www.EBSketchin.com

‘We got beat because Google runs itself as a series of experiments run by its engineers. They are constantly trying new things at a ferocious rate. A Google chief scientist says they run 3,000 to 5,000 experiments a year. If you use Google in a week, you’re likely to be in three experiments. You don’t know you are, because they are experiments.’ | A Yahoo engineer on Google

Absolute time vs. effective time

Most folks who have an interest in personal productivity have probably experimented with tracking time. This is challenging because this can cause large amounts of overhead – e.g., if you’re spending a minute every fifteen minutes noting down what you did. It can also be very distracting. After a few attempts with minimal success over the years, I think I have finally developed a system that works for me. More on this coming soon at a blog post near you (yes, this is just a teaser :-)).

A key part of the success has been learning to focus on effective time vs. absolute time. People call “effective time” by different names – focus time, flow, deep work, etc. I think of it as “effective time” as it is the time that was really spent in getting stuff that matters done. So, a few tweaks that have helped me focus on “effective time” are –

1. Not measuring time spend on email or admin. That’s not to say admin doesn’t get done. It is just that I know I will end up doing it. Admin and email also tend to be my favorite tools for procrastination. So, not measuring them means I keep focused on the things I ought to be working on.

2. Being strict about measuring “effective time.” After a 2 hour burst, for example, I record it in the form of a calendar event on my Outlook. I’ve generally erred on the side of being strict around exactly how much I put in. If I feel like I spent only 1 hr 40 mins, I generally put in an hour and a half (generally measured in 15′ intervals as it is easy to count at the end of the week).

3. Not sweating the small stuff. I’ve been measuring how I spend my time for 14 weeks now and have learnt that I shouldn’t worry about small slippages. It is completely okay to sleep an extra hour, spend an extra 15 minutes enjoying your lunch or to just stare into space. What really matters is what you do when you get to work. In fact, the less stressed you feel, the more you will probably get done. If you can squeeze in effective time when you are at your work desk, the small stuff doesn’t matter.

It comes down to understanding and then measuring the effectiveness of the time you spend working. Meetings, for example, are an example of time you might measure as “work” but it is typically low effectiveness work. So, you definitely need to think about what you really need to do to get work that matters done. Once that is done, then it is all about creating a clear list that spells it out, not worrying about absolute time you’ve spent on your desk and just maximizing the effectiveness of time you spend working.

Once again, don’t worry about time spent at the office. Worry about what you do when you are actually there.

(This is the sort of post that feels so obvious and simple once you write it. Somehow, the execution tends to never be close to obvious or simple..)

System Optimizers vs. System Creators

Think about life a 150 years ago. People on earth wouldn’t have been able to imagine the things we take for granted now – mobile devices, the internet, professional services, massive healthcare systems, expensive degrees, etc. In fact, the sight of so many of us running around like ferrets working through “deadlines” on computers would have been right out of the weirdest science fiction movie.

Oh, wait. Science fiction movies didn’t exist 150 years ago.

It is so important to keep perspective that everything we take for granted today was invented by people like us – often within the last 100 years. And, since it is all invented, it matters that we think less like system optimizers and more like system creators. It is all well to game the system and succeed. But, what happens when the system itself is changing really quickly?

This idea is going to be even more important going forward because we might soon find ourselves at a point when most “traditional” jobs are obsolete. We’ll soon need to stop to think about what makes us as humans tick. What does the world look like when most of us don’t need to work to put food on the table? Will we be measuring unemployment the way we do today? Why do we measure unemployment in the first place? What would being employed even look like?

Some thinking is definitely in order.

Lobsters in the Titanic

Actions and reactions drive our happiness. If our actions are aligned to our purpose and values (i.e. if the what, why and how are in place), we give ourselves a good shot at happiness through what we do. However, our actions make up a smaller part (10%?) of our life experiences when compared with our reactions. A big part of life is just dealing with stuff that happens to us. Some of this is driven by our actions and some of it is just random.

To deal with all this “stuff,” the single best happiness increasing skill is the ability to keep perspective. So, if things didn’t work out this week, this is just a reminder that the setback for you was, perhaps, a miracle for someone else.

What goes around does come around and your turn will come, too. And now, for the best part of today’s post – a quote I came across –

“The sinking of the titanic was a miracle to the lobsters in the kitchen.”

Indeed it was. What a great lesson in perspective.

A case for selfishness

I began writing on this blog at a time when I felt my insecurities were taking over my ability to be happy. I was an unhappy 19 year old. I had just seen an initiative of mine criticized and had taken the criticism a touch too personally. In many ways, this blog is my version of “Dealing with insecurities for dummies.”

Insecurities cause envy and self-doubt – two emotions that rouse the worst in us. These emotions make dealing with insecurities complicated because these emotions often complement each other. And, there is no easy way of dealing with envy or self doubt. The other challenge is finding a way to avoid the instinct that causes both these emotions to surface. This instinct is drawing unnecessary comparisons with people around you. The more you compare, the more envy you feel and the more you question your own self-worth. This is a vicious cycle.

The only solution I’ve found to get past this is a certain degree of selfishness and self absorption. This degree of self absorption enables us to relentlessly focus on ourselves and our own process. It fills our thinking-time with interesting challenges around issues we face rather than around what everyone around us is doing.

I am of the view that you don’t ever get rid of your demons. But, you do learn to keep them at bay. So, I don’t think you ever truly get rid of insecurities. You just learn to accept their presence, work with them, and consistently let your best self shine through. On some days, this is pretty hard to do. On those days, I just need more reminders that I am doing what I am doing for a reason and I have got to be patient to see it through.

Is there ever any guarantee that what we do will work? Absolutely not. That’s why we’ve got to work hard on our own process. If it doesn’t work this time, we’ll need to figure it out by next time. At the end of the day, our approach needs to be customized to our personality. And, that can only come with self awareness. Radical self awareness is easier said than done, of course. And, it is bloody hard to get to radical self-awareness when you are dealing with bouts of self-doubt. That’s why I recommend trying a bit of selfishness and focus on our selves first.

I’ve found that detour to help.

In search of profound

I woke up this morning asking myself – “So, what is something profound you’re going to share as your learning for the day?”

Wrong question, I soon realized. I’ve learned never to aim for profound. Instead, I find it is better to just focus on something meaningful I’ve learnt. There are a couple of reasons this works better.

First, profound for whom? There are very few concepts that might seem profound for everyone. Instead of attempting to please everyone, just write for two people – yourself and one other person who you know reads your blog.

Next, it is hard to be authentic if you are working too hard to position yourself. I am no multi-million dollar entrepreneur or venture capitalist imparting pearls of wisdom. I am just a twenty something graduate student sharing what I learnt or observe. I’m sure this doesn’t work for many. It works for a few. That’s fine – they know what they’re signing up for.

Finally, if you put too much pressure on yourself, it becomes easy to just not show up. That’s part of the magic, too.

So, a note for this week – just show up, be authentic, and do what you can with what you have where you are. And, who knows.. every once in a while, you might just outdo yourself.

Your own R&D lab

Companies that rely on winning based on product leadership require top quality R&D labs. These R&D labs allow them to test out various ideas and bring the best of them to the market. The most innovative companies do a great job with sustaining high quality R&D wings. Failure in the market can be very expensive and, thus, not investing enough in research can cost companies who want to be innovative. Just ask any of the pharmaceutical giants.

So, let’s apply this to our own company – Me, Inc. How can we go about creating our own R&D labs?

The essence of research and development is to think of an idea that you believe will add a lot of value down the line, to find the cheapest and most effective way to test it and then to execute.

So, let’s say you believe learning how to build a mobile app will add to your future earning potential. The R&D based approach would be to pick up a book or two on app development, to invest in the necessary app development tools, and to just get started building an app.

In some ways, every side project you choose to spend your time on is an example of an R&D lab. The big questions, then, are – are you intentionally thinking about the ideas you want to test/the skills you want to learn? And, are you building an R&D infrastructure that allows you to test different kinds of ideas/skills?

The great companies of tomorrow will be built off today’s weekend research projects…

Deciding not to do any marketing – Building Help2Grow.org

It has been a long while since I’ve put up a “Building Help2Grow.org” thanks to an implicit choice we made a couple of months back. When we founded Help2Grow.org in January this year, we had many plans on the marketing front – an active blog to tell our story, an active Facebook page to engage the community, an active Twitter feed, a great monthly newsletter etc. Over time, these initiatives have fallen off the rails. The central reason for this is the fact that we’ve had our fair share of struggles over the past few months. These struggles have been on 3 fronts –

1. A distributed team that wasn’t getting its act together. Thanks to a variety of reasons, we seemed to be struggling to get our act together. On the one hand, after 6 months of attempting to run a charity in addition to all our jobs and commitments, the honeymoon phase was definitely over. On the other, a bunch of us faced disruption in our schedules with fairly valid reasons such as cross continental re-locations. We were struggling though.  We seemed to have lost our mojo and our momentum and we needed to gain it back.

2. Troubles with partners. We had a couple of partner situations that were just not working out. We needed to step back and take stock.

3. Legal hurdles. Getting a charity fully functional in India is no easy feat. Despite a solid track record, we were unable to get enough movement on the required legal certificates to receive tax exemption. That’s an ongoing struggle. We had also decided we’d apply for a 501c3 registration in the US as nearly half the team is currently based in the states. All in all, there were a few legal hurdles to jump.

These issues led to a complete loss of momentum. We were soon showing up to our calls but not really getting things done. The frustration began to show, people began to drop from calls, and not preparing for calls became the norm for a couple of months in between. And, somehow, our actions aimed to get the momentum back just didn’t seem to be working. That’s when we stumbled onto 2 insights –

1. We needed a real core team that would keep each other accountable. When we started out, we had a team of 14. Over time, this came down to a more manageable group of 7-8 folks who were actually getting things done. We needed to make this official and begin to create accountability within the team again. So, we did just that. We still keep our whole team copied on emails but we have a separate group on Whatsapp for the core group and we’ve begun expecting each other to show up prepared. A culture of accountability goes a long way.

2. Good managers give their team members clarity on what needs to be done. This was entirely my failing. Over time, I’d assumed that we’d just respond to the sheer magnitude of work by just getting things done. That clearly didn’t happen. Why, I wasn’t doing anything myself. We needed someone to break work down and give people clarity on what to do. I had completely neglected this. So, we spent all of last call aligning on the major projects and priorities and broke up these projects down to granular tasks so we had absolute clarity on what needed to be done. Voila – things have begun moving again.

Through all of these changes, there was no movement on marketing and I took it up as my responsibility. We needed to re-think our initial goals. Over this time, we had implicitly decided not to do any marketing and I thought I’d just make that official and continue with inaction. Hopefully, I’ve made our reasons apparent. But, in case I haven’t, it is a combination of two reasons –
– We have very limited bandwidth. This bandwidth needs to be used carefully so we’re delivering value to our partners who, in turn, can impact the lives of the kids we hope to impact
– We want to be authentic about the problems we’re facing. At this point, we just aren’t at the operational level we desire. And, we need to work hard to fix our ship before we share stories of success. The good news is that we’re putting in the work and should have more to share shortly.

Does this mean you’re not going to hear from Help2Grow.org? Absolutely not. We will continue to share stories as and when possible. It will just not be a key priority. We’re going to work hard to fix the leaks in our ship and deliver value to the kids and organizations we aim to serve. More to follow soon – just forgive us for the occasional silences. We’ll just plan to make it worth it when you do hear from us.

And here’s hoping our actions make a difference..

This blog post has also been posted on the Help2Grow.org blog.