Category: Everything else

Breaking Bad and slippery slopes

Breaking Bad is a consistent presence in lists of the greatest TV shows of all time. After watching the show, I realized that its genius lies in its deep exploration of one core concept – a slippery slope.

Walter White’s transformation from ailing Chemistry teacher to ruthless drug lord happens slowly and gradually – one bad decision after another. It is an inevitable consequence of his growing greed and the need to do two misdeeds to cover a previous one.

It reminded me of a reflection I shared from Clay Christensen’s “How will you measure your life” –

“No athlete starts out wanting to dope. But, one small compromise leads us down a slippery slope and we soon find ourselves in a place where we never intended to be. It might seem like one extenuating circumstance but life is a series of extenuating circumstances. 

Figure out what your values are and never deviate. You can’t follow 99% of an ideal. It’s 100% or nothing.”

Indeed.

Unreasonable progress

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

I think of G B Shaw’s quote from time to time.

On the one hand, it explains why humans who drive tremendous amounts of progress have personalities/characters many of us wouldn’t want to emulate. After a point, being unreasonable violates virtues we hold dear.

On the other, it is a reminder that we also ought to be unreasonable about the things that matter to us from time to time. It isn’t a risk-free strategy and it certainly isn’t a strategy that solves for popularity of any kind.

But it is often how progress is made.

Reflections from an injury

I recently injured myself and strained my MCL or medial collateral ligament. This is a simplified diagram explaining the various ligaments in our knee – P = posterior, A = anterior, L = lateral.

4 reflections from the injury:

(1) Don’t “scratch the wound.” In my first week after the injury, I found it tempting to keep checking on the strain. That doesn’t help.

I eventually went to see the doctor and got a knee brace. 3 days after wearing the brace, things were already feeling a lot better.

(2) Keep moving – to prevent undesirable side effects. Excessive rest, for example can cause more problems than it solves. It is important we keep our muscles moving.

Another example – wearing the brace for three days caused pain in other parts of the leg. I took it off eventually – I’d learnt my lesson on not scratching the wound.

(3) Take rehab exercises seriously. They helped gradually strengthen the muscles involved.

(4) Freak moments are often the cause of injury. As is often the case, the cause was a freak moment that resulted in an unexpected “split” that strained my MCL. A good reminder of the idea that we can always work on being safer – but if we engage in high intensity sports or exercise, such moments are an inevitability.

A good friend who I spoke to in the aftermath had a philosophical take – injuries are just a sign that we’ve pushed ourselves and lived… in the truest sense of the word.

(5) Exercise is the ultimate injury prevention tactic. The most important lesson on injury prevention was a realization I had immediately after the incident. I realized this could have been worse if I hadn’t been exercising my legs regularly. My flexibility has become markedly better in the past couple of years.

In essence, every hour we spend working out helps us prevent serious injuries.

Do the work. It matters.

v35

The past 365 days have taught me many lessons. As I reflect on the ones I hope to take forward into the next year, I thought I’d pull out the top three.

(1) Health and fitness: Health is always the starting point when I share what I’m grateful for. When health becomes a problem, everything stops. That’s why Peter Attia’s Outlive hit all the right notes. It explained why a consistent focus on health and fitness mattered and broke down how to work on it effectively. And it is advice I’ve been working on incorporating every day since.

(2) Memories: The most important lesson I’ve learnt on parenting is that “the days are long, but the years are short.” We’re now just over 7 years into this journey and that idea rings true. We’re also in that magical period where our kids think we’re cool and look forward to hanging out with us and our parents. I am very aware that won’t last long. So we’re doing our best to make the most of the time together by giving ourselves as many shots at making lasting memories. Intention is the strategy.

(3) Clarity of vision, relentless energy, and systems: I’ve begun to think about leadership as a combination of clarity of vision, relentless constructive energy, and the ability to build systems that enable our teams to deliver results. Every time I reflect on those ideas, I realize how much work I have to do. The size of the task also provides perspective. You never know if a good day is a good day.

Best to just keep plugging away and do our best to make it meaningful, make it count.

(past birthday notes/version updates :) – 34, 33, 32, 31, 30, 29, 28, 27, 26, 25, 24, 23).

Correspondingly huger mistakes

There’s a great Albus Dumbledore quote on mistakes – “I make mistakes like the next man. In fact, being–forgive me–rather cleverer than most men, my mistakes tend to be correspondingly huger.”

I’ve thought of this quote many many times over the years. Putting aside the subtle humor from the great (fictional) wizard, there’s a powerful truth in there. The size of mistakes grows with the amount of responsibility in our lives.

When I was a child, I made many mistakes. Most of those had no consequence beyond some short term pain.

As we grow older, we become risk averse as we attempt to reduce the number of mistakes we made. It is logical to do that because our mistakes cost us a lot more as adults.

Recovery from an injury takes longer. Things we lose tend to be more expensive. Opportunities we forego are often more consequential.

The same happens when we progress in our careers. As an individual contributor, getting the plan wrong can mess up a project. But a manager’s mistakes on strategy can led an entire team astray. So, when companies get senior hires wrong, the damage is significant and often long lasting.

This is one of those simple sounding ideas with many implications. I’ve reflected on two of these more than others –

(1) I make more expensive mistakes now relative to ten years ago. These mistakes hurt when they happen. For example, I lost a great pair of glasses recently. I used them every single day for four years and loved them. There’s no cheap replacement. It is an expensive mistake – as simple as that.

We made a mistake on a small piece of furniture we bought for our home recently too. Again, an expensive mistake relative to a decade ago when I owned no furniture.

Any mistake made that involves our family or the team I work with is more consequential than it was too. That’s part of life. It comes with more responsibility and accountability – generally good things.

(2) As painful as they are, it is important to keep some mental allowance for mistakes. When – and not if – they happen, it is helpful to spend time to understand how we could have avoided it. The best reflections involve fixes to our systems. They ensure we are more organized, build in buffers/redundancies, and be more in the present.

But outside of that, there’s no point beating ourselves up too much.

There’s no point fearing or over reacting to mistakes – they come with the territory.

Just be kind to ourselves and focus on a creative, constructive, and corrective response.