A Learning a Day

I remember first reading the quote “Money doesn’t buy class” more than a decade ago. It was one of those ideas that I thought I understood.

But I didn’t. I hadn’t interacted with folks with a lot of money up until then.

Over the past decade, I’ve had the opportunity to interact, meet, and get to know – directly and indirectly – people with vast amounts of wealth. And I have come to realize that wealth doesn’t correlate with class. Not one bit.

Wealth simply amplifies what already existed. If there was goodness, wealth brought out a lot of it. If there was insecurity, wealth made sure you could never miss it. And an absence of class stayed as is – regardless of the number of zeros in a bank account.

Money does not and cannot buy class.

Class is earned by emotional awareness and actions that don’t correlate with the accumulation of wealth.

I experienced an outcome a few days ago that should have, at least for a while, felt positive. But it didn’t feel that way.

Somewhere along the way, I think I had set my sights on a possible grander outcome. And now that I had moved the goalposts, what I had didn’t feel all that great.

I reflect on this idea from time to time – especially when someone asks for my career/life story. I don’t think I could have imagined the life I lead right now two decades ago. It was the stuff of dreams just a decade ago.

And yet, it is so easy to take it all for granted by simply moving goalposts. I’m here now – so it is natural to spend all my time thinking about how to get there. There’s always a “there” – a good reason to forget about the magic of “here.”

It is human to keep raising our expectations and to thus keep moving those goalposts. It takes a lot of discipline and commitment to nudge ourselves when we do and remind ourselves to not take our current reality for granted.

All that discipline and commitment is worth it though. When we habitually move goalposts, life just becomes a bottomless pit of unfulfillment.

Beware moving goalposts.

The simplest way to waste a day is to spend time and energy on areas outside our circle of control.

Spending time within that circle of control do not guarantee progress. We may still encounter frustration and disappointment. But, if keep at it, it all pays off in the long run.

Time spent outside our circle of control, however, doesn’t inspire any forward momentum – now or in the future.

An email came in from Amazon Prime announcing that they’re adding Amazon Music to the Amazon Prime bundle.

Without knowing anything about the internal rationale, this feels like a smart move.

My guess is that this wasn’t a big money maker for Amazon – likely a rounding error relative to Amazon Prime. And this move enables them to do 3 things at once –

(1) Win customer loyalty – at a time when most subscription services are working on ways to increase prices, Amazon has chosen to go the other way and make an already valuable Prime subscription more valuable.

(2) Simplify their SKU line up and focus any and all sales on the Prime product

(3) Increase the value of the Prime bundle so that it is easier to raise prices on Amazon Prime later. It is likely that increasing the value of the Prime bundle by $1 will give them orders of magnitude better RoI vs. attempting to sell Amazon Music separately.

More is not always better.

Smart.

“I don’t mean this callously, but it is an undeniable fact that if you are interested in getting newspaper headlines, you are better off becoming a mass shooter than inventing a life-saving medical therapy.” | Steven Johnson on the quiet passing of Dilip Mahalanabis.

Dilip Mahalanabis (see more in SJ’s tribute post) was the key figure behind Oral Rehydration Therapy, a revolutionary and surprisingly simple technique that has prevented millions of people, particularly children, from dying of diarrheal diseases like cholera over the past few decades.

RIP and respect.

Great coaches consistently make good players great by (a) putting them in roles they’re best suited to succeed and (b) inspiring self-belief.

Finding the right role is a pre-requisite to great performance – it creates the right environment. Self-belief is the difference maker.

“There was a merchant in Baghdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions. In a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, Master, just now when I was in the marketplace I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death that jostled me.

She looked at me and made a threatening gesture, now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me. The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went.

Then the merchant went down to the marketplace and he saw me standing in the crowd and he came to me and said, Why did you make a threatening getsture to my servant when you saw him this morning?

That was not a threatening gesture, I said, it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Bagdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.”

There are two lessons I thought of when I heard this.

The first is that there’s no point outrunning death. It catches up with us all. Best to make peace with our mortality and make the most of the time we have.

The second is an idea Master Oogway shared in the (likely) most quoted movie on this blog – Kung Fu Panda – “One often meets their destiny when trying to outrun it.”

I’m not a fatalistic person. But we also live in a world where we control little.

And it is good to recognize that from time to time.

People learn when they’re surprised.

This simple insight has shaped how I design learning sessions of late. Instead of focusing just on the content, structure, and delivery, I’ve found myself spending time thinking about how to introduce surprise.

Surprises introduce humor, make insights more memorable, and inspire a shift in perspective.

That shift in perspective, in turn, leads to learning.

I had the opportunity to listen to humanitarian chef Jose Andres recently. Chef Andres started his talk with a beautiful story about learning to cook from his dad.

Every Sunday, his dad used to invite a whole host of people from the village for lunch. His dad loved cooking and his son was his de-facto assistant. Despite his eagerness to learn how to cook the paella, his father used to always put him on fire duty. This meant going to the forest, finding logs, and then making sure the fire was burning with the right intensity.

One day, his father explained why his obsession with the fire. He shared that everyone who was eager to learn how to cook paella jumped to trying to stir the paella or put ingredients into the pot. However, he believed that the most important part of cooking well was learning how to control the fire. Control the fire right and you’ll figure out the rest.

This was a wonderful lesson in cooking for an eager young cook. But, in retrospect, it turned out to be an important life lesson that stayed with him since.

Learn how to control your fire. The rest will follow.

Powerful.

“Charity should not be about redemption for the giver. It should be about liberation for the receiver.” | Jose Andres (originally by Robert Egger)

It resonated.