Our ability to respond quickly to feedback is directly proportional to our ability to not take feedback as personal affronts.
It generally is about that thing we did, not about us. (And, in the off chance that it was about us, we’re still better off focusing on that thing.)
We learn faster when we train ourselves to get over ourselves.
The biggest lesson I learnt in my first year as a parent was flexibility. That year was a journey in accepting that few things would go as per plan. I’m now more flexible than I’ve ever been. That, however, was the easy first lesson as our first was still a baby.
The second year was all about realizing that I needed to curb my instincts to fight fire with fire. I’ve written before about my instincts and the challenges posed by it. I was also fortunate to read Marshall Rosenberg’s wonderful book – Non-Violent Communication – at a time when I needed it.
This third year has been about figuring out a path to dealing with the root of those instincts – impatience. When I take stock of my good and bad parenting moments, patience tends to be the common factor.
In the good ones, I demonstrated plenty of patience and approached the situation with a desire to understand as well as a willingness to be creative and tactful. In the bad ones, I had none of it, rushed too quickly to an attempted solution, and sacrificed effectiveness for a misplaced sense of efficiency.
So, I’ve begun to think of my experiences as a parent as my opportunity to get better at being patient. I have the benefit of having plenty of opportunities to practice every day while also being blessed by a partner/role model who seems to always have plenty of it.
I don’t expect to become the most patient person around. But, I do hope to become more patient and learn to channel my impatience better in the coming month.
Here’s to that.
I listened to “The Algebra of Happiness” by Scott Galloway recently. There wasn’t much that was new as it was a compilation of posts from his weekly blog – “No Mercy, No Malice” that I’ve enjoyed reading over the past months.
I’ve shared a few of his posts from time to time as I find his writing a nice mix of interesting, provocative, and heart warming. Amidst notes with strong points of view and occasional humble bragging, there is plenty about the struggles he’s faced and continues to face. The struggle to be a better son, father, friend, teacher, and citizen.
It is that struggle that makes life interesting and challenging all at once. And, I’m glad he shares that. Those are the sorts of notes that help put things in perspective.
My notes from the book are sparse. But, as I look back on what I’ve taken away, there are three notes that resonated.
First, Prof Galloway observes that hard work and a lack of balance early in a career has a disproportionate impact later. In the early years, speed helps. There’s no right way to do this – only we can decide what trade offs make sense for us.
Second, the ratio of how much we sweat to watching others sweat is a leading indicator of success.
And, third, the most important decision we make is who we marry – if we decide to do so.
One of the most reliable ways of showing we care about a cause is to consistently show up with positive energy, be prompt, and do the work.
No talking necessary – our actions say plenty.
I was on the receiving end of some aggressive behavior on a public playground yesterday. We encountered an aggressive teenager (I think) who was determined to use most of the field to hit the baseball really hard.
As we were encroaching on his personal play space (we were playing soccer further away), he started whacking the ball with the intention of hitting us. After two scary near misses in rapid succession, we walked up to him to see if he might be willing to direct hits away from us.
That, as you might imagine, was an exercise in futility.
We walked away after a slew of abuse, racist insults, and a threat to fight one of us and “make him bleed.”
So, we shook our heads, walked away, and moved our group as far as away as we could. We soon realized that he and his three friends only needed the field for about ten extra minutes. So, all that aggression, bullying, and violence for ten extra minutes…
It took me a few minutes to process what happened. I was mostly struck dumb as the exchange got heated. And, as I processed it, my first reaction was surprise at the level of stupidity with many sarcastic post facto mental retorts.
After a couple of minutes of that, I remembered what I learned from “Non Violent Communication” and realized I was missing the plot. It takes a lot of internal hurt to lash out the way he did with every intention to cause physical and mental harm.
I walked away with an appreciation for the amount of pain the boy must be going through… with gratitude for the cards I’ve been dealt with.
There’s so much we take for granted when things are, in the grand scheme of things at least, good.
When we think of ideas of various kinds – those that spur creativity, gratitude, or learning for example – we generally start off assuming we don’t have them.
However, once we begin to pay attention to them (e.g. by writing them down), we realize that there’s more of them than we first thought.
All we needed to do, it turns out, is change how we see.
Once we habitually do that, we shift our perspective. And, suddenly, they’re everywhere.
There’s always a temptation to attempt to salvage a bad day with a bit of extra work to get this or that done.
Resist it.
Just as we ought to write off bad investments and ignore sunk costs, end bad days quickly and get rest.
We often overestimate how much we’ll get done on a day that just hasn’t been productive. On such days, aim to do less, say lesser, and take the break we need.
The beauty about this approach is that we also underestimate just how much we can get done when we’re on a roll. That will happen tomorrow.
PS: A post on this is both a recurring theme (there’s probably been one per year for most of the last decade) and a reminder of how long it takes to actually learn something – i.e. to put a lesson in action. It took a while to understand this concept and a while more to implement it once I had identified the day as one that wasn’t great. Now, the challenge has shifted to identifying such a day as quickly as possible…
“If I have more love/money/friendship/fame, will I be happier?”
Whenever we see “have” preceding “be” in such questions, we can be sure unhappiness is lurking around the corner.
Flipping the order, however, changes everything.
The question we’d ask now is – “What kind of person do I have to be to have more love/money/friendship/fame?”
By being trustworthy and caring, it is likely we’ll attract love and friendship into our lives.
By being skilled at something valuable and disciplined in our practice and execution of the skill, it is likely we’ll attract the financial security we seek.
And so on.
There is a chance we’ll win the lottery and have what we desire before being the person who deserves it.
Waiting to win the lottery, however, isn’t good strategy.
Better to flip the question and be the kind of person who deserves what we want to have.
I was seeking career advice a few years back and had managed to find 15′ on the schedule of a successful person.
I’d shared that I was hoping to switch careers into technology and hoped to work in the Bay Area. This person’s advice was to fly over to the Bay Area for 6 months, spend time with start-ups, and try and find a job.
Their reasoning was thought through – this was clearly advice they’d given to many others.
It just happened that the advice wasn’t useful for someone who didn’t have an American passport. And, for someone without said passport and who’d gotten married recently, this advice could have ended up being disastrous.
I think about that conversation from time to time every time I see someone giving generic career or life advice. Every once in a rare while, the advice is universally useful because it is rooted in principles.
But, most of the time, the nature of the advice is similar to what I’d received – right for many, just not for me.
“Right for many, just not for me” is useful perspective to keep with us as we receive advice. It allows us to appreciate the good in any and all advice we receive while not taking its lack of immediate applicability to our context to heart.
It also helps us do a better job when we’re asked for advice.
I received a response to the post on KLM’s response to the climate crisis (I’ve stopped calling it climate change) that asked about the purpose of the blog.
This reader politely explained that he liked a majority of the posts he read – he just didn’t appreciate the political activism. It admittedly took me a second to realize that notes on the climate crisis were being perceived as political activism – but, I’m getting used to most issues being political issues in the United States. :-)
While I wrote out a short answer to his first question on email, I thought it was a good one to pose for myself to answer over the weekend – what in the world is this blog about?
I was an unhappy university student in 2008. After a month or so of searching for the cause, I arrived at extreme insecurity that had spawned a fear of failure. I reasoned that a way out of these fears might be to write about them on a blog. And, maybe, just maybe, someday I’d begin to view the challenges and failure I face as learning experiences. In addition, since I didn’t have the discipline to do anything everyday, I thought a learning a day would be a worthy challenge.
Learning is a broad term. And, it has evolved over the years by evolving as my thinking has evolved as well as causing the evolution of my thinking.
Over the years, I’ve realized that I tend to obsess about 3 broad themes that I value – people I care about, learning from my experiences and learning how to learn, and attempting to make a positive contribution. In short – people, learning, and contribution.
As a result of the focus on people I care about, there are many posts about relationships and human behavior as well as a post nearly every week on lessons learnt as a parent.
Next, learning is a broad category. The three biggest buckets of learning posts tend to be – i) reflections from my experiences and conversations, ii) observations on events, and iii) notes on living with a growth mindset.
And, finally, contribution. My thinking on contribution has evolved over the years. Initially, a lot of my writing used to be about technology in the broad strokes. Over time, however, this has crystallized into three areas of focus – i) notes on product management (what I do for a living), ii) the impact of technology on jobs and the future of work (again, what I do for a living), and iii) the climate crisis.
As I spend a lot of my time work thinking about product management and jobs, writing here is the primary outlet for my evolving thesis on how we might approach the climate crisis and how I could contribute. So, there’s going to be a lot more where that KLM post came from.
This is what makes following this blog a crazy journey. It took me a while to articulate that difference between writing for yourself vs. writing for others. This blog is an example of the former. As a result, the topics won’t resonate every day. Some days, they’ll provoke. On others, they’ll challenge. And, on a few, they’ll resonate.
That’s why it will remain a niche blog – roller coasters aren’t for everyone.
But, the reason it is a blog and not a journal is because there’s the hope that there are a few of you who won’t mind the roller coaster… and maybe even like it?
It is why I only have deep gratitude and appreciation for those of you who stick along for the ride and write in from time to time to share your notes, lessons, and reflections.
It all means a lot.
And, for those of you who’ve subscribed recently and have been wondering what this blog is about, I hope it helps.
A Learning a Day 