2 kids under 2

The wonderful thing about the internet is that you get to learn from the many who’ve gone through experiences that are very similar to you. As we prepared for having 2 kids under 2 years, we knew what to expect. Or, at least we told ourselves we did. I have three reflections about my experience so far.

First, the best word that describes our reality right now is “cranking.” We are on – from morning to evening to night and from weekday to weekend. It is exhausting but being exhausted isn’t really an option when you have an energetic 21 month old. Our next break is when our parents visit end of the year. And, we dream of going over to our friend’s places on weekends, handing over our kids to them, and going to sleep. :-)

Second, someone I know made an insightful comment about the 2 young kid challenge. He described the effort as “exponentially hard (compared to having 1 kid) until you see economies of scale, i.e., when they start playing with each other.” That feels accurate. We’re roughly a year away from that.

And, finally, there’s a quote about a sense of humor being a major help in dispensing with minor troubles. That is so true. Humor helps keep these first world problems in perspective and reminds us to be grateful for all the blessings – and there are many. We frequently find ourselves reflecting on how challenging this journey would be if we didn’t laugh as much we did.

But, we do. And, I’m grateful for that.

Things that do not scale – in business and life

On balance, growing our business requires us to do things that scale. We need processes, infrastructure, and systems that help us deliver value to hundreds, thousands, or even millions at a time. You may not want to over-think scaling as you find product-market fit – but, beyond that, businesses that succeed do a good job with scaling.

The dichotomy here is that our life and careers work the other way around. The more you obsess about scaling your impact, the less you contribute in the rooms you are actually in. The more you attempt to personalize, the less personal you are.

Deciding to not do things that scale means doing fewer things – but doing them in a way that is authentic to us. It means adding our brand of thoughtfulness to the emails we send. It means demonstrating our brand of extraordinary care to the folks we touch on a daily basis. And, it means writing those thank you notes.

Our contribution, and ensuing impact, on people are often determined by our ability to consistently do things that do not scale.

Investments and soap

I came across an intriguing quote on investments from a banker at Merrill Lynch- “I’ve always felt that investing is like a bar of soap. The more you handle it, the smaller it gets.”

It is both a powerful analogy and a great reminder that, when it comes to investments, doing nothing for long periods of time is a very powerful tactic.

How to identify bad advice

You’re trying to make an important decision and you find that there’s a lot of advice flying around. Sadly, you soon realize that most of it isn’t good and very little of it is actually useful. How do you make it easier for yourself to identify bad advice?

There’s a lot in my sketch (below). So, here are the 3 key takeaways –

  1. Great advice has 2 characteristics – it is based on principles and it is intended for your benefit. Great advice is incredibly rare because it requires a lot of thought to get to the principles and in-person investment to understand your specific context.
  2. On the flip side, bad advice is what you hear 80%+ of the time. The most telling characteristic of bad advice is that the giver either speaks to himself/herself or to his/her interests. Combine this with a random jumble of thoughts and anecdotes and it is easy to spot. Most bad advice is a result of absence of “skin in the game” (H/T N N Taleb). When someone says something is ‘good for you’ when it is also good for them and when they don’t face the downside of the decision, it is likely not good for you. Think: Peter Thiel telling you to drop out of school.
  3. We are all asked for advice by folks around us. To become someone who gives generally useful advice, we need to combine 2 things – 1) Think in terms of principles – i.e. truths that are applicable across contexts (hard to do) and take the time to structure your advice, and 2) Stop giving advice to yourself (very hard to do). As a bonus – this scales as it doesn’t need to be personalized.

I hope you find this useful.

Managing expenses on Google Spreadsheets

There are many personal finance tools that help automate managing our expenses with fancy graphs and stats on our expenses. Mint, for example, uses data from your credit cards to generate graphs about your spending across categories. Each of your credit card apps likely do so too. But, if you’re in it to be on top of your expenses, I’m still a big fan of managing expenses on a Google Spreadsheet.

I’d shared a simple Google spreadsheet template in a post on calculating expenses 6 years back. We still use an evolved version of that template (happy to clean up + share an updated version if it is valuable to you). And, managing our expenses involves entering each expense. This process has friction built into it by design because the friction inspires consciousness.

We get all the other benefits – we always know exactly how much we’ve spent across major categories. And, we have a wealth of historical data cut in a way that makes sense to us.

We recently compared notes on how we do this with a couple of friends and they tested the “old fashioned” spreadsheet approach as well. Their first reaction after switching was that their spreadsheet made them acutely aware of the areas where they wanted to minimize expenses. This is so true – it is effective to the point where you soon realize you don’t need a budget.

Every technology tool creator’s goal is to make our lives more convenient. But, it is on us to both find the right tools and add the necessary amount of friction to use these tools consciously.

And, as far as topics that are as important as personal finance go, the more the consciousness, the better the long term outcome.

The three main things

Before we wade into that ocean of email/messages on other communication tools and start working away on everyone else’s priority list, the first question for Monday morning is – are we clear about the three main things that will help us move the needle this week? 

It is okay if the three things evolve as we receive new information over the course of the week. It is also okay if we decide someone else’s main thing is more important than ours. It is just not okay to not have given our list of three things thought and definitely not okay to not have them written down someplace where they can be tracked.

In a workday with more communication tools than people we need to actually communicate with, the main challenge with getting things done remains the main thing. The main thing, it turns out, is to keep the main thing the main thing.

In the long run, everything else is gravy.

The pat routine

The period between the first and second years of a child involves a collection of leaps that all add up to a transformation. They go from mostly helpless babies to walking, babbling, little human beings. As witness to this transformation, I find myself frequently blown away by how much they learn by observation. For example, when we run out of ideas, we ask our 21 month old to put us to sleep – this, in turn, involves getting the “pat routine” going.

The pat routine is part of the final few minutes before she heads to bed at night. We take turns to pat her for 30 – 60 seconds each before leaving the room. As part of her re-enactment of our pat routine, she does a play-by-play of every detail. This includes quirks involving how we pat her, what we say before and after, and the time we take to do it.

Whenever I see her do this, I’m reminded of just how much learning is done by watching what we do versus listening to what we say. She still listens to what we say – most of the time – but she watches what we do all the time.

I noticed similar patterns in my own behavior recently. I was listening to someone speak and felt my eyes glazing over. But, later that day, I saw the same person do something that I paid a lot of attention to. They were simply doing what they said earlier – but, the doing caught my attention in a way the talking couldn’t.

So, it isn’t a “child thing.” Or, rather, it shouldn’t be. I’ve had some expensive life lessons in emotional intelligence where I paid far too much attention to what someone said instead of watching what they did. In making these mistakes, I clearly un-learned stuff I’d known by instinct in my early years. Kids get learning-by-observation right from the start. It is just on us as parents to make sure we’re walking our talk.

And, that applies just as well to us as leaders/teammates/human beings.

—

PS: I thought I’d share a ~40 min podcast with Paul on his “Think Boundless” podcast a few months back. We spoke about this blog, riffed on the future of work, and many lessons learned on a variety of topics including parenting. It is here – if you do take the time to check it out, do send me notes/feedback on rohan [at] rohanrajiv.com or by replying to this email if you receive this by email.

The Law of Minor Annoyances

The Law of Minor Annoyances: Minor annoyances expand to fill any and all available mental bandwidth you make available to them.

We encounter minor annoyances everyday in the form of small frustrations, little spats, doses of bad luck, and irksome exchanges. If left unchecked, they fester, become major annoyances, and cloud all perspective.

Much of our daily happiness at work and at home, then, depends on our ability to understand and apply the law of minor annoyances. The more we learn to let go, the more happier and more productive we will be.

Germs and shields

Writing here every day for the past decade has inspired many changes – chief among them is a higher degree of awareness about my response to various stimuli. One application of this awareness is a better understanding of how I (/we?) fall sick. I call it the germs and shields theory.

The premise of the theory is that we face attacks by germs throughout the course of the year. But, we naturally shield ourselves from these attacks when we make good regular health decisions – i.e. when we sleep 7+ hours every night, eat healthy, keep good mental health via good mental food and company, and stay active. However, when we go through periods when our ability to do some of this and take good rest is stretched, our shields come down. And, when they do, the germs hit us with some combination of the flu, throat pains, and so on. (Note: every once a while, if the germs don’t get us, we can also become accident prone)

So, what should we do when the germs finally get us? I think there are two constructive steps.

First, take a break and get those shields back up. Someone once told me that falling sick is the universe’s way of saying – “Dude, take a break.” While the germs should naturally see to this, it is worth putting a stop to any kind of work, switching off, and recovering. The more we postpone the break, the longer our shields will be down.

Second, take some time to think about what caused our shields to go down and how we can reduce its occurrence. My goal is to keep such occurrences to once per year. Such periods of frenetic activity are often not in our control. But, every once a while, we can walk away with powerful insights about changes in our operating model. Dealing with these issues now go a long way in preventing bigger issues in the future.

For example, my latest “shields down” moment is a direct result of not changing a few things as we settle into life with two kids under two.  Making it a habit to take a personal day off every few weeks to just sleep in, get some admin done, etc., has never been more essential.

Simple actions can go a long way in helping prevent issues. And, as far as our health goes, the old adage – prevention is better than cure – is spot on.

RSS and Feedly

“In the middle of all of this, Wired’s Article It’s Time For An RSS Revival caught my attention. I’ve been using RSS continuously for over a decade as my primary source of information. My current feed reader is Feedly, which I think is currently the best in class. It’s one of my primary sources for information that informs me, is private, and allows me to control and modulate what information I look at.

While RSS has disappeared into the plumbing of the internet, there’s still something fundamental about it. Its durability is remarkably impressive, especially in the context of the lack of the evolution and perceived displacement of the protocol over the past few years.”

The above paragraphs were from venture capitalist Brad Feld’s post on the wonderful RSS protocol today. Thanks to Google Reader and Feedly, I’ve found myself grateful to RSS nearly every day over the past 8 or so years.

I only read blogs on my Feedly (no news sources). As a result, opening up my Feedly generally feels like sitting down with a cup of coffee with a friend. While I look forward to my daily dose of Seth in the morning, Feedly is also how I’ve gotten to know those of you blog + write in from time to time. I look forward to posts from Arthur, Ashwin, Barry, Carol, Efesa, Jana, Marvin, Mary Ellen, Mike, Paul, Ryan, Shishir, Steve, and Zac – among others who’ve since stopped writing. :-)

The RSS protocol has endured for almost two decades. I’m hopeful it will endure for many more.