Category: Everything else

The only tuition you need to pay at experience university is to exhibit bad judgment and make mistakes.

It’s simple, really. Go out, do something, and make a mistake – ideally a big one. Voila! Your education at the best university in the world has just begun. No essays or statements of purpose required. The only expectation is that you will take action and make mistakes. Ideally, you try to make sure you don’t repeat the same mistakes but hey, no one is perfect.

You only look silly here if you don’t do anything.

After all, attempting to not make any mistakes could be the greatest mistake of them all.

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PS: On a different note – If you are wondering about what’s happened to the “Rockstar Anayst” series, I plan to get back to it in 2 weeks. I’m sorry but I have no appetite to open up an excel sheet while on honeymoon. :-)

‘Real change is cultural change, and you must go about it with the intent to change the culture, not to merely make the easy change, the easy sale.’ – Seth’s post of the day

I’ve been thinking about culture a bit lately – specifically about culture within families and friends – the atomic unit equivalent of culture. There’s a lot of talk about corporate culture but corporate culture is defined and set by the small group of founders – an atomic unit similar to that of a family or group of friends.

Culture, in my limited experience, is one of those things that simply exists whether you attempt to define one or not. If you do actively attempt to define one, you give yourself a shot at creating one that you will be proud of. If you don’t, well, you might be surprised at the end result.

95% of families and friends groups make no attempt whatsoever to actively define a culture. They assume you can just show up and let it happen. In many cases, it works out pretty well thanks to a strong character who inadvertently sets a few “norms” and then again, in many cases, it just doesn’t work out in long run.

But, as Seth points out, real change is cultural change; and I find myself on a bit of a mission to attempt to define cultures for two important parts of my life – my new family and my group of friends. With the family, my wife and I intend to talk through what our “family” would stand for. I expect lots of great learnings from this process.

With friends, we were helped along by Lifehacker’s fantastic article on “Mastermind” groups. Go read it. The idea here is to form a “mastermind” group with friends who want to make a difference. The inspiration is a mastermind group of friends from  Oxford who went on to write some of the greatest fictional works of our age – Lord of the Rings, Chronicles of Narnia, etc. In our case, we aren’t united by the “what” i.e. write fictional works, but by the “why” i.e. to be the best we can be. We are looking forward to seeing how this works out.

Ultimately, the true test of both these experiments in culture will be the strength and longevity of these relationships along with our collective impact on the world. We haven’t done too bad on strength and longevity so far but there’s always room for improvement. I guess it all begins with the shared belief that since we are all here on this journey, we might as well fill it with love, laughter, and learning and make it meaningful, make it count.

Many more learnings on these culture experiments to follow. Exciting times!

This week’s book learning is from Willpower by Roy Baumeister.

3 groups were asked to do the following in a 2 week period –

1. Regulate emotions: Hold emotions back every time they felt a strong surge
2. Regulate posture: Remind themselves to sit straight every once in a while
3. Regulate food: Regulate what they ate

2 weeks later, the 3 groups were tested on their willpower by squeezing a hand grip as hard as possible for as long as possible. The “sit straight” group did markedly better.

But, when the participants were asked to retake their test after their mental energy was depleted, the 3 groups performed equally poorly.

It turns out that their willpower muscles hadn’t gotten powerful in the past 2 weeks but thanks to reminders to regulate posture, their stamina had increased! So, willpower depletion was a slower process.

Those who followed it up by regularly exercising self control by sitting straight got progressively better in the 2nd test too. Not surprisingly, they did better at other goals too. These students reported more physical activity, less alcohol and cigarettes, cleaner rooms, and healthier food – signs of improving self control.

“Willpower is like a muscle.”
Sketch by EB

So, how do we increase our willpower stamina? Concentrate on changing a habitual behavior –

– Remind ourselves to sit straight every once a while (e,g, set an alarm 3 times a day)
– Use a different hand for routine tasks like using the mouse with your left/weaker hand
– Change speech habits e.g. avoid “like,” “uhm” etc.
– Always keep your room clean and never leave dishes in the sink
– Avoid curses, taboo words and expressions of anger as they take willpower too

Perhaps it’s a skill that is honed or perhaps I unconsciously trained out that feeling in my stomach for many years. 3 times this year, my gut told me I was doing the wrong thing. 3 times this year, it’s intuition proved right and I’ve paid the price.

I’ve learnt to listen to my gut on many a small decision. Over the past couple of years, I’ve learnt that my gut gives me a signal if it feels the food on the plate isn’t right. It’s also serves as a lovely early warning system for an experience or person. Again, unerringly right.

But, when it comes to bigger or longer term decisions, I’ve been consciously overriding it with thought. Most times my thoughts agree with my gut and perhaps I’m faced with a recency bias as I write this; but I can’t recall a single big decision in the past year where my gut has been wrong in making a decision.

In one instance, it’s been repeatedly telling me an engagement doesn’t feel right. It’s high time I learnt to listen to it.

Male and female restroom signs at a hotel I visited recently.

I stopped and looked twice to make sure I was entering the right door. Why make it so darn complex? There are times when innovation is simply unwelcome. Let’s go back to why they were created and make sure we don’t let some artsy design get in the way of it’s original purpose.

Another such example was an attempt at innovation on a restaurant’s lunch menu. It had all sorts of interesting names for it’s savoury crepes and one of them was called “Calamari.” I promptly ordered Calamari and was looking forward to my dose of seafood. Calamari turned out to be a ham and cheese crepe.

And, finally, a positive shout out to Auckland airport. This is brilliant emotionally intelligent signage – we don’t really want to know if a flight is “scheduled,” we just want to know what we must do. “Relax,” “New Time,” etc., fixes that.

Well done Kiwis!

Happiness = Set point (50%) + Living conditions (10%) + Voluntary choices and actions (40%)

Our set point is our balance point where we return to on most days. This means we all have a happiness range and our set point is somewhere in the middle of the range. This determines 50% of our happiness.

Living conditions involve better clothes, houses, cars, etc. All of this accounts for (only) 10% of our happiness.

Our voluntary choices and actions constitute a whopping 40% of our happiness and this post recommends the “most-of-it” rule to earn your stars on this.

On most days, 70% of what happens to us is good. On good days, this goes up to 80%, then up to 90% on amazing days, and a whopping 95% on extraordinary days. Finally, to present the other end, I’d wager that we have 40%-50% good stuff happen to us on a bad day.

There are 3 things to note here –
1. We vastly exaggerate negative events in our mind. Try journaling all the good and bad things that happen to you in a day and you’ll know what I mean.

2. Even on extraordinary days, we have an idiot or two who, knowingly or unknowingly, threatens to muck things up. That’s just life. There may be the occasional day in your life when everything goes perfect but on most days, your victory lap always finds a critic.

3. Our happiness largely depends on what we choose to focus on. I’m learning to focus on “most-of-it.” On 90% of the days in our life, most of what happens to us is good/works out just fine. It’s a worthwhile check if you are feeling unhappy – is “most of it” working?

If the answer is yes (and it generally is), you have no excuses. No moaning allowed. There will always be dampeners and problems. Expect them.. and eat them for breakfast.

For most social interaction, “why” isn’t a necessity. It’s a great-to-have and makes a huge difference. For example, if you meet a customer service person whose life mission is to serve or to excel in service, you feel the difference. The “why” naturally translates to the “how.” The “why” is an intrinsic choice, however. It can’t be easily trained.

Training employees to embody a “how” is easier. If done well, it can mask the lack of “why” because employees have been trained to behave in a certain way and do so in a way that feels genuine. Most air hostesses at Singapore Airlines are trained to exude a certain positivity – whether it is their life mission to serve, the act of putting on a Singapore Airlines uniform seems to bring out the best in them.

Instead of focusing on the “how,” too many training programs focus on the “what.” They train their employees to say please, sorry,  and thank you a lot with other phrases that sound nice on paper. All of these miss the point – it’s not what you say but how you say it that makes an impact on a person.

People don’t remember what you say or do, they remember how you made them feel.

A friend’s mom explained that her wonderful singing abilities were thanks to power cuts. As soon as their house had a power cut, dad would begin to sing and daughter would promptly join. As a family, they were actually very underwhelmed by the coming of the inverter as the lack of power cuts robbed the family of some precious bonding time.

I have a lovely power cut experience too. As a kid growing up, we used to have power cuts in the middle of the night. As it got too hot to sleep, we would all troop outside for some fresh air and we would be greeted by cheers and calls from all over the street as our neighbors would do the same. We met a couple of these neighbors last year and we went back to discussing some fond memories standing outside our homes during power cuts.

It’s a nice reminder that technology cuts both ways. On the one hand, we are able to stay in touch with more friends and family than ever before and yet, on the other, it also means we can build virtual islands around us and avoid the kind of stuff that actually builds great relationships.

“If the whole world was blue, there would be no blue. We need something that is not blue to understand blue.” | Eckhart Tolle (paraphrased)

The more the pain and chaos, the more we learn to appreciate those moments of joy and calm. Joy, however, is different from happiness. Joy is a feeling while happiness is an ability.

Pain and chaos are just feelings. They are a part of this marvellous piece of engineering we call life. Like all feelings, they can be understood, accepted, and embraced. Understanding comes with self awareness, accepting comes with proactivity, and the embracing comes with wisdom. Rafael Nadal plays through pain every single time he steps into a tennis court. He’s a great athlete but an even greater role model simply because he’s learnt to embrace the pain.

The pain and the chaos are just part of the infinite game. We just have to learn to play it, to celebrate the wins, to learn from the defeats, and move the hell on. Can’t change the waves but can learn how to surf.

Let me say that again – pain and chaos are just feelings that can be accepted and embraced. Happiness is a skill we develop that we can apply even during the worst of times. The moment we learn to make that distinction, life will never be the same again..