Fire and fire

A required skill as a parent of a toddler is an ability to cycle through diaper changes with minimum fuss. Sometimes, these end up being a joy because your toddler is willing to humor you. But, the real test is how you respond when they decide to fight it. How do you respond when faced with fire?

My natural reaction is to face fire with fire and just insist she gets it done. But, as you can imagine, this doesn’t sit well with her. Besides, as she grows bigger and stronger, it is evident that it isn’t a winning strategy anyway.

The trick with influencing kids is to be adept at distracting them. That doesn’t come naturally to me. So, I frequently find myself starting with the forceful reaction and then changing course. This morning, I managed an abrupt transition from “C’mon – just get this done already” to a song that worked like a charm.

I first came across the quote “when tempted to fight fire with fire, remember that the fire department uses water” seven years ago. It is incredibly relevant to me and is one I think about every time I feel I reacted inappropriately to conflict. The challenge with changing your default reactions is that it isn’t easy to “practice” these responses easily. And, without practice, you don’t ever really learn to change that behavior.

But, thanks to these diaper changes, I have an opportunity to work on this every day.

Here’s to getting better.

Get more vs. appreciate more

A delicious custard cake – the kind that melts in your mouth – is wasted on someone who doesn’t take the time to appreciate it. So are beautiful beaches, good teammates, the smell of flowers, supportive partners, good health, and thoughtful managers.

Lacking appreciation, it turns out, makes getting more a leaky bucket problem. It doesn’t matter how much effort you put into getting more – it won’t count for much.

We spend large swathes of our day working on skills (productivity, skills that make us better at our jobs) that are directed at helping us get more.

What if we siphoned off a portion of that effort to develop our appreciation skills instead?

Reactions and responses

When we face bumps in the road, we can spend time on reactions – oh crap!,” “why does this happen to me?,” “what will they think?,” “is this really my fault?” – or responses – “what is the creative, constructive, corrective action to be taken here?.”

3 things to know about these modes –

(1) Human nature dictates that we have to spend time in reaction mode first. There is no getting away from it even if we know it is a complete waste of time. It doesn’t help that it feels good to be in this mode for the short term.

(2) Given we have to spend time in reaction mode, the choice we exercise is whether to spend a quick second or many hours (depending on the nature of the problem, we may even lose the ability to respond after some time). We have limited time to deal with any given problem – so, every second wasted in reaction takes away time from our response.

(3) Moving from reaction to response is governed by how quick we move to take responsibility (response-ability). The quicker we’re able to shoulder the responsibility for what happens to us, the more painless the transition. And, this response-ability is among the strongest indicators we have of the strength of a person’s character.

Dropping baggage

There’s a famous zen parable about the importance of dropping baggage and letting go.

Two monks were at the banks of a river with a strong current when a young woman asked if they could help her cross. Carrying her would be against their vows. But, without a word, the older monk carried the woman across the river and carried on with his journey.

The younger monk couldn’t believe what happened. A few hours passed before he blurted out – “How could you carry that woman on your shoulders?”

The older monk looked at him and replied, “Brother, I set her down on the other side of the river, why are you still carrying her?”

Simple reminders to reset, like this one, are powerful because we all accumulate baggage on our journeys. We develop preconceptions about some relationships, projects, and ways of approaching problems. These preconceptions erode our ability to approach things with a beginner’s mind and listen for learning. Most importantly, they make it impossible for us to simply “be” in the present moment. The baggage weighs us down and muddles our focus.

Take the time today to think about (or meditate upon) areas of your life that seem spew negativity in your day.

Perhaps it is time to let go and journey lighter.

Separating the writing from the thinking

“For the average business or professional writer, producing more literate memos and reports does not mean writing shorter sentences or choosing better words. Rather, it means formally separating the thinking process from the writing process, so that you can complete your thinking before you begin to write.” | Barbara Minto, The Pyramid Principle

I’ve decided to spend more time learning how to write better and thought “The Pyramid Principle” and “The Elements of Style” would be my go-to textbooks for the structure and style portions of this journey respectively. But, as Barbara Minto thoughtfully points out, we often confuse feedback in our ability to structure our writing as feedback to our style.

Structure is the first summit to conquer. To do so, I’ll need to do a better job separating the thinking process from the writing process.

In data we (don’t) trust

There’s a growing legion of companies and product teams that aspire to call themselves “data driven.” When they make decisions, they tell tales of how Google tested 40 shades of blue and eliminated the need for intuition and gut-based decision making.

But, as data might suggest, extreme beliefs in any approach are problematic and a belief in data driven decisions is no exception.

For the data to point the way, we need suitable problems, the right inputs and tracking based on good questions and thoughtful hypotheses, reliable data pipelines, good analytical judgment in overlooking outliers and picking a robust methodology, and versatility in the tools to analyze and interpret the outputs. Every once a while, all of these align and it all just works.

But, for the most part, we’re better off marrying a desire for data with a healthy skepticism for what it is telling us. It is that skepticism that will ensure we keep pushing for the right questions and iterate our way into insights that get us closer to the truth.

Better to be data informed than data driven.

Don’t seek great mentors, seek great influences

Mentorship is a luxury. A great mentor relationship requires many favorable conditions – chemistry, good timing, and proximity among them. And, yes, when it works, it can have a magical effect on the learning curves of both the mentor and the mentee. But, so much of finding that great mentor relationship is outside our control that it is a reactive approach to learning at best, and lazy at worst.

Great influences, on the other hand, are all around us. We have more access to admirable folks than ever before. The life, work, and thought processes of luminaries like Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, and Marcus Aurelius are just a book away. That person you admire likely has a blog, a book, or an active twitter account. If we are the average of the five folks we spend our time with, it is easier than ever to be exceptional by simply letting ourselves being influenced by the wisest minds in human history.

The best part about great influences don’t have to be famous people. Your inspirational co-worker or parent can do the job as well.

We can, of course, wait for that great, uber successful, mentor to pick us and continue to let ourselves off the hook until they do.

Or, we can go seek great influences, learn from them, and keep plugging away.

Our choice.

What policy led to this bad outcome?

Julia Galef, a writer on rationality, had a great spin on how we can better separate processes and outcomes and pick where we want to maximize. When things go wrong, she asks herself – “What policy am I following that produced this bad outcome?”

For example, she shares a policy example wherein you always arrive 1 hour 20 minutes before a flight. However, this policy may result in you missing the occasional flight due to an accident on the road. But, if you over react to the bad outcome and change policy to be at the airport 2 hours earlier, as a frequent flier, you’re going to be spend hundreds of hours waiting at airports.

Similarly, I could spend 2x the time before sending every email to ensure there isn’t any typo or mistake. But, that would be a very expensive policy that would eat in to other productive time. So, it is best I assume that there will be mistakes and repeat sends that fix them from time to time.

There are a few places in life where we need a 100% success rate. It makes sense to choose fail safe, rigorous policies in those cases. But, otherwise, we’re better off picking good policies/processes/decisions that do the job most of the time.

And, in the off chance they don’t work, we must learn to habitually separate bad outcomes from good processes.

(H/T: Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss)