A Learning a Day

“The big dirty secret is that everyone, especially, the famous, are just making it up as they go along.” | Kevin Kelly

This resonated.

So much of life is what we make of it.

I was emailing with a customer service alias from apparel giant Calvin Klein recently.

Every time I heard back from a customer service representative, they addressed me as “Dear Unknown.”

After one round of this, I signed off with my name just in case my email address or name wasn’t showing up in the “from” in their system. That didn’t stop them from responding with “Dear Unknown.”

I even got a survey request at the end of that chat that started with “Dear Unknown.”

It is hard to believe someone intentionally set up the system that way. So I’m assuming I’m missing some basic system limitation and that I am an unlikely edge case.

Even so, a great reminder to be thoughtful about edge cases as we design systems. These edge cases can turn out to be… ugly.

We discovered Beyonce’s “Brown Skin Girl” recently (the song starts around the 1 minute mark).

We love the catchy tune. But the conversation around the lyrics was a memorable one. The chorus is –

Remember what Mama told me
Brown skin girl
Your skin just like pearls
The best thing in the world
I’d never trade you for anybody else

Our five year old said his favorite line was “Brown skin girl” because he has brown skin himself and he loved that the song was for him.

Our seven year old said she loved “I’d never trade you for anybody else.”

We’ve been having more conversations about skin color lately. I guess it is part and parcel of going to school in a place where your skin color is not the norm. This song will now make it into the conversation next time. Thank you, Beyoncé, for making this conversation possible.

That line now brings a tear to my eye every time I think about that conversation.

Many years ago, I went for a dinner with a family. It was a nice meal with good food and good conversation.

As the meal progressed, I was struck by how functional it all seemed. There was a lot of humor and thoughtful conversation. And, while I may have been guilty of seeing what I wanted to see, it all seemed… perfect.

A few years later, I learnt that the parents had a rough divorce. Things had been going downhill for years and the humor and thoughtfulness were now permanently replaced with animosity and dysfunction. I was shocked to hear it.

There were many reflections from that experience. But the biggest of them all is that things are not always what they seem from afar.

It is easy to idealize the lives of others and compare the parts we see with the entirety of our life. But things are not always what they seem from afar – it is why comparisons are a fool’s errand.

“Don’t compare” is easier said than done. But it is about as wise as advice gets.

One of the harder truths to internalize in any position of leadership is that the job isn’t about being liked.

It is about providing clarity of vision, energy toward getting the right things done, and delivering results.

Often, those goals exist in direct opposition to being liked. And in those situations, the only way forward is to remind ourselves that it is okay to be tough – as long as we’re being fair.

Leadership is often an act of deferring the gratification of being liked in the short run for appreciation in the long run.

“What you can see, you can be.”

One of the challenges when we’re out in the trenches is to take the time to look beyond what we see.

In the long run, a big lever in building strong relationships is a loop that involves –

(a) Being upfront about what we want

(b) Being flexible enough to receive feedback on whether what we want is compatible with what the other person/group needs at the moment

(c) Building the self-awareness and judgment to want the right things.

Periodic reminder to self – you can’t always do big things. But you can always do small things with extraordinary care.

They add up.

As we make important decisions in our lives, we often seek answers to questions like – “Who do I want to be?” or “What should I do?”

In such moments, it helps to remind ourselves that it is just as helpful to start with – “Who don’t I want to be?” or “What shouldn’t I do?”

It is likely you’ve heard about some of the drama surrounding Open AI in the past week. Nearly 1 year ago, Open AI took the world by storm with Chat GPT – an exponential advance that arguably brought conversations around AI to the mainstream.

With all the noise and news cycles focused on AI, it is easy to forget that there are two other exponential advances in the works – especially around RNA based therapies and renewable energy. Here are a couple of updates on these that caught my eye.

Let’s start with RNA based therapies. I wrote about Doctor Katalin Karikó in early 2021 when I learnt about her pioneering leadership on RNA based therapies that helped marked the beginning of the end of the COVID pandemic. I made a comment about her story having all the ingredients for a Netflix/Amazon limited series show. Now that she is a 2023 Nobel prize winner*, I’m hopeful that will happen.

The amazing thing about RNA based therapies is that we’re just at the beginning of what will likely be an incredible decade for medicine. Herpes, Malaria, Sickle cell anemia, and heart disease are all ailments with RNA based solutions currently being developed/tested. There’s going to be plenty more coming here.

Next, onto renewables. There’s always something amazing to say about solar these days. Chile, for example, hit 60% of electricity from renewables in the first 10 months of this year. That is incredible. And such progress on renewables is the main reason we are tipped to avoid the 3 degree C climate tipping point.

However, we are still on track for 2.5 degrees C – sadly, this isn’t something we want to be “on track” for as the consequences are still going to be severe. And if we’re going to bring that down further, we’ll need more options for energy storage that don’t depend on rare-earth metals like Cobalt and Lithium.

That’s why Swedish company Northvolt’s “Sodium-ion” battery is a true breakthrough. We need more such alternatives.

The pace of change in AI is a lot faster (months) than that in renewable energy (years) and biotech (~decade). But their impact is just as profound and worth keeping an eye on.

*Funnily, I was so inspired by her work then that I’d reached out to her for an interview for this blog. She kindly responded and asked if we could try a few months later (this was just as the vaccines were rolling out around the world). I didn’t follow up. Perhaps I should have taken my chance before the Nobel prize came. :-)