Category: Everything else

Many great friendships share their origins in “what” or shared experiences like same school, same neighborhood, etc. Friendships are purely optional in a sense. If both of you want to play, you have a great game. And if you don’t, too bad. You’ll find another partner.

Friendships are inherently flexible. You can have great friends united in the “how” i.e. friends who follow the same thinking/decision making process or in the “why” i.e. similar purposes, dreams, and goals.

We often think the rules that apply to friendship should work just well at work. They don’t. A shared experience rarely makes a great team member. They can help strengthen bonds between team members (remembering that experience in the trenches) but they don’t make working with each other any better. Great companies build cultures that bring together people with similar “why’s”. So, that’s often take care of as well.

The difficulty lies in aligning the “how.” If how you approach tasks and projects, how you make decisions, how you communicate is incompatible, it’s not going to work. There may have been many who shared Steve Jobs’ vision of changing the world but aligning the “how” to actually make a working relationship successful was not for everyone.

If we want to be able to pick great bosses to work with, great teammates, we need to be as self aware as possible – to understand our “how” and look for others who align with it. The rest follows.

This week’s book learning is part 1 from a 3 part from The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg.

When Michael Phelps’s alarm clock went off at 6:30 A.M. on the morning of August 13, 2008, he crawled out of bed in the Olympic Village in Beijing and fell right into his routine.

– 3h to go: He pulled on a pair of sweatpants and walked to breakfast. He had already won three gold medals earlier that week and had two races that day. Phelps’s first race—the 200-meter butterfly, his strongest event—was scheduled for ten o’clock.

– 2h 30m to go: He began his usual stretching regime, starting with his arms, then his back, then working down to his ankles, which were so flexible they could extend more than ninety degrees, farther than a ballerina’s en pointe.

– 1h 30m to go: He slipped into the pool and began his first warm-up lap. The workout took precisely forty-five minutes.

– 45 min to go: He exited the pool and started squeezing into his LZR Racer, a bodysuit so tight it required twenty minutes of tugging to put it on. Then he clamped headphones over his ears, cranked up the hip-hop mix he played before every race, and waited.

Phelps’ coach Bob Bowman focused his early training on habits that would make him the strongest mental swimmer in the pool and he did it with “the science of small wins.”

Small wins are exactly what they sound like. A huge body of research has shown that small wins have enormous power, an influence disproportionate to the accomplishments of the victories themselves. “Small wins are a steady application of a small advantage,” one Cornell professor wrote in 1984. “Once a small win has been accomplished, forces are set in motion that favor another small win.”

Michael Phelps cranking up his pre-race hip-hop mix (Img source)

When the race arrives, Phelps is more than halfway through his plan and he’s been victorious at every step. All the stretches went like he planned. The warm-up laps were just like he visualized. His headphones are playing exactly what he expected. The actual race is just another step in a pattern that started earlier that day and has been nothing but victories. Winning is a natural extension.

Small wins are part 1 of the Phelps formula. Part 2 coming up next week..

Wish you a happy weekend and happy week!

I started blogging 5 years ago on May 12, 2008. My first post was had longer post scripts than content.

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A learning a day..

The name says it all – Its just what the blog is intended to be. To help me re live some of those meaningful learnings. Hopefully, I will be able to keep up writing one a day.

(PS: I tend to have weirdly long days sometimes resulting in the next day being understandable short(36 hrs and then sleep through the next for example). So, the definition of day can be a bit..well.. shaky..

(PPS: That’s just me making excuses! Hoping to make it happen..)

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I love how I make an excuse to start with (the joys of being 19, eh?). If integrity is the ability to make and keep commitment, I had pretty low integrity in those days as I didn’t have the willpower to follow up on my commitments – I did marginally better on commitments to others thanks in part to an inflated ego.

Five years and 2766 posts later, I can say with confidence that this blogging thing has changed my life. In committing the “A Learning a Day” ideal, I committed to learning more, learning better, treating failure as learning, and showing up every day. I’ve tried hard to live up to all of that.

And I’ve been fortunate to have a small readership that’s been steady, encouraging, and supporting all at once. There was a time I knew the numbers at the back of my hand but then I realized that this readership thing can really get into your head. A year or so ago, I used to check Google Analytics and Feedburner stats every couple of days to see what my page view count was. Now I do so every few months. I realized somewhere along the way that I don’t this to be the most popular blog in the world. it was a great opportunity to revisit the “why” behind this.

I blog primarily because it makes me better. This journey of learning inspires me and I share it in the hope that it will inspire others too. And I am blessed to have a small blog community of folks who subscribe to this blog via their feed readers, emails, and the like and thus take part in this journey. I treasure hearing from all of you – thank you for sharing your stories every once in a while via email and the comments on this blog.

I really am honoured for the time and attention you give my writing. I hope to continue to be worthy of it.

Best wishes and wish you a nice week ahead,
Rohan

I blogged about attention a year ago. This paragraph from Eric Weiner’s great book sums it up well..

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“Attention’ is an underrated word. It doesn’t get the… well, the attention it deserves. We pay homage to love, and happiness, and, God knows, productivity, but rarely do we have anything good to say about attention. We’re too busy, I suspect. Yet our lives are empty and meaningless without attention.

My two-year-old daughter fusses at my feet as I type these words. What does she want? My love? Yes, in a way, but what she really wants is my attention. Pure, undiluted attention. Children are expert at recognizing counterfeit attention. Perhaps love and attention are really the same thing. One can’t exist without the other.”

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I’ve always struggled with attention. I tend to be attention deficit by nature and smartphones, social media, and notifications haven’t exactly made it easy (excuses.. yes, I know).

13 months down the line, I don’t think I’m too much better at this. I still struggle with attention.. but I’m hoping to improve by focusing on mindfulness first. Mindfulness is just the ability to “be” in the moment. The essence of zen, as described by a teacher, is the ability to focus on one thing at a time. That requires radical self awareness and mindfulness or conscious action is the first step.

Over the past few months, I’ve been slowly changing habits that increase distraction and thus reduce mindfulness. For example..

– On my phone. All sorts of push notifications are switched off. I switched off email notifications more than a year ago and it’s now moved to applications like whatsapp. This helps a lot.. because I now only get messages when I want to see them or when I want to engage.

– On my computer. I switched off Outlook’s new email alert more than a year ago. That helps a lot. Additionally, I’ve switched off from all sorts of messengers and communicators except when I really need to use them.

– On social media. 5 weeks ago, I decided to experiment with never checking my Facebook news feed. The experiment has worked well and I only get on Facebook to share blog posts, quotes, and the like. It’s one way and I’m loving that.

– On email. I’d tested a project to only check my personal email and social media in 3 hour intervals. That’s been fantastic and has been working for a few months now.

– On meditation. Thanks Headspace – nothing like a daily morning reminder to be more mindful.

I’ve paid lip service to mindfulness and attention for too long. I’m hopeful I will report some improvement in a year from now.

Happy mindful weekend!