Category: The Real Leaders Project

For a person interested in psychology, human behaviour, and happiness, Prof Mihaly’s work on “flow” is the stuff of legend. It was a real honor interviewing him (it was a very memorable experience too). For all those who are reading about Prof Mihaly for the first time, I’d recommend his wonderful TED talk.

About Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has contributed pioneering work to our understanding of happiness, creativity, human fulfillment and the notion of “flow” — a state of heightened focus and immersion in activities such as art, play and work. Csikszentmihalyi teaches psychology and management at Claremont Graduate University, focusing on human strengths such as optimism, motivation and responsibility. He’s the director of the Quality of Life Research Center there. He has written numerous books and papers about the search for joy and fulfillment.

My favorite bits –

“We published several articles from was the study of internet chess and how people play.  We asked people who played against each other to fill out how much flow they had in the game afterwards.  In a week we collected over 1000 games and it was a good way to study whether our hypothesis was correct.  Our hypothesis was that the greatest enjoyment would come when the two players were exactly matched in terms of their skill level because that means that the challenges and skills were equal for both players.  We found that was almost true, but it was even better if the opponent was about 7% better than you were.”

“Junk flow is when you are actually becoming addicted to a superficial experience that may be flow at the beginning, but after a while becomes something that you become addicted to instead of something that makes you grow.  You find that even in chess, which I love.  I think it’s very difficult to exhaust chess as a source of growth, and yet you find that so many chess masters when they reach the end of their career, even while they’re young in their thirties or forties, can’t go beyond their skill level anymore.”

“The Greek philosopher Plato wrote a thousand years ago that the greatest challenge for teachers and parents is to teach young people to find pleasure in the right things.  He called it pleasure, but actually what he meant was enjoyment.  The problem is that it’s much easier to find pleasure or enjoyment in things that are not growth-producing but are attractive and seductive.  After a while you get trapped by a cycle of short term bursts of excitement, and then it becomes a habit; and now you feel bad if you can’t play, but you don’t feel good when you can play.  That’s a problem that goes beyond flow.  It goes to the philosophy of life.”

“Usually I find that people who become intrinsically motivated in their job, whether they’re surgeons or cooks in a restaurant, are the people who paid enough attention to what they had to do to discover small differences in performance and small differences in the product and became fascinated with the possibility of improving what they were doing.”

“The activity becomes a form of self-expression. This who I am, this is what I can do, etc.  When that happens, the work becomes intrinsically motivating which means that even if you are paid for it, or even if you get other rewards for it, it also very importantly gives you a sense of this is who I am.  This is what I can do well, and this is what I am called to do.”

“Twenty years ago I discovered a little passage in Dante Alighieri’s book The Monarchia which was written in 1317 – 700 years ago.  He says that every being enjoys most of all expressing itself.  We had dogs for a long time, and after I read that I realized that each dog was the happiest when it did what it was bred to do.  The hunting dogs liked to hunt; the guard dogs liked to keep people away from the door.   The sheepdog loves to chase children around until they get together like a flock of sheep.  When they do that they look happy, content, and proud.”

“Happiness is not something that is guaranteed, or that comes with our birth certificates.  It’s a possibility that we have to discover how to be happy.  Happiness is to do things that are harmonious with who we are, with what we can do, with what we like, and with what we think is right. Do it. Don’t figure that somebody else will do it, or that you don’t have a right to do it. “

Thank you Prof Mihaly for that wonderful interview. The full transcript, as always, is on RealLeaders.tv

Dhanya interviewed Josephine Ng after seeing her on TV in a show about women CEOs in Singapore.

Josephine retired from running an ad agency, and now runs a social enterprise that provides development opportunities for women of any age. She and her husband run this business together. It’s a simple idea – they run expert-managed alteration houses in Orchard. The venue looks less like the regular alteration house we would have been to and  more like a classy fashion house.

You can read more about Alteration Initiative and Josephine Ng at http://www.alteration.com.sg/

My favorite bits –

“Business concept wise, we felt there was a huge market gap for high quality alteration. If you look at Singapore, or even Asia – alteration has been very hole in the wall, very messy, they would start looking for your things everywhere. There would be threads all over the place.”

“As for the group of people we wanted to help, we sought to speak to social initiative experts. Single mothers were a group of people who came up. They would like flexible work hours, and ideally work from home even. So we put sewing and single mothers together. If they have the basic skill, we could help them improve/teach them and help them earn a decent living.”

“Currently our beneficiary group includes matured women. More than 50% of our staff includes women above 59 years of age, formerly employed women who for whatever the reason can’t go back to their employment.”

“When they first come in it’s a huge culture shock for them, with or without skill. Even with skill they find that we are very particular about our workmanship. Every little thing matters in our work – the thread colour, inseam finish, outside finish, straightness of line.”

“One of the things I am very proud of doing is this – of creating women who can think about what they are doing, and not do it blindly. They learn to put in the extra effort, to show care.”

“I remember this as our very first experience. When we redecorated our workspaces, we thought a lot about the customer’s view. Coming from an ad agency, that was very important to us, the ambiance. We spent money on doing up the decor and the especially the lights. When they went in, they asked why the lights were so dark, and why were the cabinets all black. To them the setup of the tailor’s work station was important. And we ended up realizing how our thought process went against what was really important.”

“It’s always about this one thing – whether we are doing enough to create value.”

Thanks Josephine for taking the time. Full transcript, as always, on RealLeaders.tv

We interviewed Morgan Housel, columnist at “The Motley Fool,” after reading his excellent post – 140 things to know about investing. As many of you who read this blog know, I have a lot of energy for increasing financial literacy and I really appreciate folks like Morgan who’re focused on doing just that.

About Morgan Housel

Morgan Housel is a columnist at the Motley Fool. He is a two-time winner of the Best in Business award from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers and was selected by the Columbia Journalism Review for the Best Business Writing 2012 anthology. In 2013 he was a finalist for the Gerald Loeb Award and Scripps Howard Award. He holds a B.A. in Economics from the University of Southern California.

My favorite bits –

“What’s really interesting about finance –  and I think this is true for a lot of fields whether you’re in physics, math, chemistry, history, or whatever it is – the more you learn the you more you realize how little you know.”

“If you really just started in investing, what’s really important is not necessarily when you’re young the investment decisions that you make.  It’s saving as much money as possible rather than getting caught up in the details about the different kinds of investments that you’re making.”

“I think if you’re the kind of investor who really has no interest in business, finance, or the stock market, just investing in a low cost index fund, dollar cost averaging so you’re putting in the same amount of money every month over time is really a smart approach for most investors that don’t want to spend a lot of time doing this or are really not interested in it. “

“I really think that people who are interested in business, commerce, and economics, but not necessarily interested in trading or the stock market, are the people that I think can really do well for themselves over the long run – over the course of 20, or 30, or 40 years – by investing in really good high quality companies that they feel confident about.  They can do well by investing in a good diverse mix of companies that they plan on holding for a long period of time.”

“I think a home makes a good place to live in, and that provides value for you of course.  You’ve got a great place to live in, spend the holidays with your family, have a barbeque with your friends, and that’s great.  The idea of the home as an investment, there’s really not much evidence backing that up.”

“Almost invariably the best investors are the people who have control over their emotions. Why do some people survive and other people perish?  The common denominator in survivors in these extreme situations is that the survivors did not panic when everyone else did.”

“In today’s 24 hour news cycle, where we have so much information online – Yahoo Finance, CNBC, and whatnot – it’s tempting to look at your portfolio all day long, minute by minute.  I think that’s very dangerous for a lot of people.  Most people should be looking at their portfolio once a quarter, four times a year.”

“The most important thing to know when you look at long term financial history is that volatility in the stock market is perfectly normal.  It’s the equivalent of having summers every year. If you look historically, the stock market falls 10% basically once every year.  If you go back through more than 100 years of data, it happens almost every year.  You get a 30% crash basically once a decade.  You get a 50% crash 2-3 times per century.”

“The single most important variable for how you’ll do as an investor is how long you can stay invested. I’m always astounded when I think about compound interest and the power that it has for investing.  Time is massively powerful.  That’s my secret to investing.  That is the most powerful concept in investing.  It’s very importantly the single most over-looked aspect of investing as well.”

The full transcript, as always, is on RealLeaders.tv.

After giving you a preview of this interview 2 weeks back, we have the real thing.

John Ondrasik is very inspiring – he is an Applied Science and Math major from Berkeley while also being a successful singer and songwriter. He sings under the moniker “Five for Fighting.” I reached out to John as I love his music. After 7 months since I first emailed his wonderful agent, Steve, we finally spoke. John’s video wasn’t working but I didn’t want to risk missing him for another 7 months. What followed was a wonderful 25 minutes. I hope you enjoy it as much as the team did.

My favorite bits –

“I think I was always into my music and was passionate about music, but I was also pragmatic enough to realize that there might not be a career at the end of the tunnel. In school I was very focused on the math and the sciences. The deal with my parents was that they would continue to support my music as long as I had a back-up plan. That was going to college and getting a degree where I could get a real job one day.”

“I am one of those 20 year overnight success stories where I worked 20,000 hours before I made a penny doing this.”

“As a young songwriter (and I tell this to other songwriters all the time) the key is to write a lot of songs, and I was. I was writing hundreds of songs a year. Not many good ones, but “Superman” was just one of those songs.”

“I think it’s almost harder sometimes to write that second song that is not just a copy of your hit, but a song that takes the next step. “100 Years” took almost a year to get right.”

“As much as you can talk about talent and inspiration and all that stuff, I’m a true believer in work ethic. If I’m not writing or playing, nothing’s happening.”

“Inspiration can come from painful places. Most of the good songs come from painful places, introspection, and integrity.”

”It certainly is a process, and it’s a very frustrating process because, at the end of the day, what sounds very simple is very hard to create.”

”You have to have an ego, but you also have to realize that it’s not all about you. You have to remember what got you there.”

“Even with technology, it costs $50,000-$200,000 to make a record when you hire mixers and engineers and musicians. Then you have to promote your record and it’s not free to hire a band, it’s not free to go on a TV show for people to hear you.
(With piracy,) I’m concerned that it’s becoming so hard to make a living at music unless you’re a superstar that music will become more of a hobby and the true singer/songwriters that can become part of the culture will be factored out just because there’s no income stream and there’s no career. I am concerned about it. I think it’s a big problem.”

“I write my best lyrics when I’m not staring at the page. I’ll put my headphones on and go for a two hour hike, and I’ll write lyrics. I find that staying active, staying healthy, and working out trigger those endorphins which stimulate the creativity too.”

“Even at my cynical old age, I do love the idea of starting from nothing and creating something. It doesn’t have to be just a song. It can be a poem, a book, a business, entrepreneurship. I love that spirit of starting with a blank slate and then ending up with something. It doesn’t even have to be great because I truly believe that the joy is in the journey.”

Full transcript, as always, on RealLeaders.tv

This week’s edition of RealLeaders.tv is an interview with the founder of a promising mobile gaming start-up. Very few mobile gaming start-ups actually succeed in generating revenues and I was keen to hear from Abhishek Radhakrishnan as to how they managed to crack the code. The other important detail here is that Abhishek is a friend of mine from university and I was keen to understand how he made the transition from a creative Mechanical Engineer to Game Designer.

About Abhishek – Abhishek Radhakrishan started his career at Logic Mills where he grasped the fundamentals of building games and developing games. Aside from collecting game XP (experience, in Abhishek’s lingo) at work, he gathered it by playing games and teaching rules of games to anyone who’d listen. He then co-founded Lambda Mu games and now, he designs games for a living with his team at Lambda Mu. Lambda Mu’s game, Pixel people, was released to critical acclaim and was released in partnership with Chilingo, EA’s mobile games division. Chilingo has previously released world famous games like Angry Birds and Cut the Rope.

My favorite quotes as always –

“I think what was really valuable for me, which I think maybe is not something that a lot of people experience, was my ability to teach people how to play games.”

“If the people can’t understand how the game works, then it’s not a well-designed game.”

(Skills of a good game designer) “exposure to as many games as possible matters.  You need to know what’s out there.  I did this by reading lots of books just to see the different styles that are out there, to broaden my horizons, to see what are the different elements I can use and combine, and to find inspiration. That’s one of the most obvious ones.  It’s necessary but not sufficient.

The next thing you need is to realize that a game is an experience.  You’re creating an experience for a person and it’s very hard to create an experience for other people if you haven’t had experiences yourself.   You need to go out there and try to do as many things as possible, see as many things as possible, and read as many things as possible.  Watch TV, movies, try things.  Read about history and literature.  Inspiration for a game can come from anywhere.  Psychology is an important field to be well-versed in because they understand behavior.  A really broad exposure to as many subjects and experiences as possible really helps the design angle.

From the practical angle, you need really good communication skills.”

“Every time there’s a crisis, or failure, or something has gone wrong it’s not about hindsight.  It’s about finding out what went wrong.  We just lost 10,000 dollars on this screw up, let’s get 10,000 dollars’ worth of education out of it.”

“In most role-playing games, one of the main goals is to get as much XP as possible, or experience.  That’s the thing for life also.  You have some unknown number of years to play this game.  We don’t know where the endpoint is, but you know that there is an end and the object of the game is not necessarily to see how much that coin balances at the end because that’s not the score that’s recorded.  It’s not even what high score is pulled out but it’s how much XP your character can get by the end. That’s how I try to look at life as well.  What can I do today to up my XP?  Every day little by little make sure you’ve done something to increase that XP bar.”

Full transcript, as always, on RealLeaders.tv. Thanks Abhishek, for taking the time!