Dealing with writing frustration

When folks learn of a daily learning blog, one of the common questions is something to the tune of – “How do you think of an idea every day? Does it get easier over time?”

On the whole, yes. It certainly feels much easier to write now than 8 years ago. However, every once a while, there are days like today when no idea really seems good enough. I’ve played around with 5 post ideas in the past 15 minutes and nothing really seems to work. It can be downright frustrating.

I have come to find that this sort of frustration is caused by one thing – wanting to write as quickly as possible so I can move onto something else that is on my mind this morning. Calm and mindfulness facilitate good writing. And, in a state of mind like the one I am in right now, the more I try to push a post through, the less my muse cooperates.

The solution at such times isn’t to give up – it very well could be though. I’ve just found that it matters that I just keep writing. Write, then delete, Then, write again. Eventually, there comes an idea worth sharing.

And, when even that doesn’t work, write about the process.

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Integer

There are many principles that govern human life and happiness. One of the more powerful ones is the idea of integrity. Integrity, as I’ve written many a time, comes from the word integer – which means whole.

In our lives, we see integrity when we see people make and keep commitments or, put another way, when they live by what they say. When you walk what you talk and talk what you walk, you are truly whole. And, this wholeness is the foundation of building trust because trust involves consistently keeping promises that you make in public. It is at the root of self confidence because self confidence comes from self trust. And, it is at the foundation of every good relationship.

As Clay Christensen might say, there is no such thing as 99% integrity. You are either fully in or not in at all. Or, viewed differently, if you want to live a life of integrity, there is no space for pseudo commitments. Either you are in, or you are not. This is particularly hard when we are almost encouraged to say things we don’t mean to be socially amicable – “let’s catch up for coffee sometime” or “I’d love to do that sometime.”

Every pseudo commitment eats away at our integrity. The less we believe our own words, the less we trust them. The less we trust them, the less self confidence we have. It is hard to never say yes when you mean to say a no. It is hard to make commitments. It is harder to keep the commitments we make.

But, then again, nothing that is powerful comes easy.

Deconstructing a mistake

I made a scheduling mistake the other day and completely missed a call. After doing so, I went through the following process –

1. Apologize. The first step, as soon as I realized I made a mistake, was to apologize profusely. It sucked doing that and I felt horrible. I hate going late for meetings, let alone miss one altogether.

2. Understand what caused the mistake. When mistakes happen, they happen because multiple things go wrong at once. For instance, in this case, the call was scheduled at an unusual time during the weekend and I had somehow missed it in my review of the weekend’s calendar on the Friday. Was that the issue though? On digging deeper, the issue I landed on was that I’d done my week planning exercise in a hurry on Monday morning after a busy weekend. I generally spend ten minutes on Sunday morning going through all my meetings for the week and moving them from my calendar to my OneNote. The daily planning exercise that follows every evening builds on the ten minutes on Sunday as it is just a minute’s glance at the next day’s calendar to make sure we are in sync.

Planning has a high return-on-investment when things get busy. This was the price I paid for not having taken ten minutes at the beginning of the week.

3. Focus on a creative, constructive and corrective response. In short, focus on what you need to do and stop beating yourself up. I was lucky that the wiser friend who I’d stood up took it very nicely. He didn’t even want to talk about it – we just rescheduled and ended up working through what we needed to do later in the day.

While our past relationship helped make sure he didn’t read much into this, a miss like this can have negative consequences. And, that’s why I’ve learnt to use mistakes as an opportunity to examine my systems.

So, if you don’t do something well, at least make sure you extract maximum learning from the experience.

mistake

Leadership, management, culture – definitions

There are many great definitions of leadership, management and culture. My favorite, and most actionable, definitions are as follows –

Leadership: Doing the right things (effectiveness)

Management: Doing things right (efficiency)

Culture: This is what people like me in this team/organization do

Are these complete? No, there definitely are more complete definitions. But, definitions, in my book, should help point us to action. There are many hundred things leaders should do. But, there’s none more important than leading the team to working on the right things – i.e. being effective. Similarly, there are many things a manager should do. But, the role is about efficiency. And, culture has way too many complex definitions and metaphors when it should simply get at the fact that it defines the default behavior for a person, team or organization.

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Hat tip to Stephen R Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People) and Seth Godin (Change the culture, change the world) for the definitions.

PS: I am working on a 1 pager synthesizing everything I’ve learned about these 3 – more to follow in a couple of weeks.

Coronary by-pass surgery success – The 200 words project

Cardiologists who performed Coronary by-pass surgery were studied in hospitals across the US. The normal fatality rate is 3% and researchers wanted to find out if some doctors were safer than others.

It was found that it wasn’t so much the doctor as much as it was the doctor’s familiarity with the hospital. The more the doctor operated with a certain team and thus understood their strengths and weaknesses, the safer he became. And these abilities were not portable. The moment the doctor moved hospitals and teams, he became as un-safe as any other.

Wall street analysts also exhibited similar teething troubles. When top analysts were hired by new firms, it turned out to be a lose-lose if they didn’t bring their team with them – the firm never got the “star” they wanted while the analyst never ended up giving a star performance.

So, when we set out hiring stars, let’s keep an eye out for their team members. And, of course, when going for important surgeries, look for doctors who are familiar with the hospital’s set up.

Surgeons didn’t get better with practice. They only got better at the specific hospital where they practiced.

surgeryImage of a Coronary Bypass Surgery team – Source

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Source and thanks to: Give and Take by Adam Grant

It is personal but don’t take it personally

Business decisions tend to be very personal. The “it’s not personal, it’s just business” adage is largely baloney. It is personal and anyone who tells you otherwise is generally lying.

There is, however, strong reason for you to not take things personally. Decisions are not a result of objective truth simply because there is no objective truth when people are involved. And, more importantly, decisions are functions of the specific situation. Situations, in turn, are functions of the context, the motives and character of all the actors. In a decision that involves you, you are just one actor out of the many that might be involved. You don’t control their motives and character and definitely don’t control the context. So, taking it personally is just a recipe to ensuring you feel hurt whenever a decision that involves you does’t go your way.

So, any business decision that involves you is personal. There’s no getting away from that.

But, for your sanity, don’t take them personally. Reflect on what you were meant to learn from the situation and move onto the next thing.

business, personal, personally

Diffusing tension immediately

The draw of devices and social media is that they help us diffuse tension immediately.

Feeling bad about something? Post somewhere to say you are and divert your attention to getting responses.
Feeling angry? Go on a rant somewhere on the internet.
Had an uncomfortable exchange? Delete the email or “fire” a reply.
Had a real world exchange that is stressing you out? Just check your phone and direct your attention elsewhere.

None of these solve the problem though. The immediate action and release might make us feel better for a little while. But, real problems are not solved by diffusing tension. They are solved by staying with the tension, accepting it and then figuring out a way forward that will actually attack the source of the tension.

Tension doesn’t need to be accompanied with feelings of worry and distress. But, it needs to feel just a bit frustrating as it will then requires us to move to a plane different from the one in which we created or experienced the problem. And, we won’t get there by checking our phone.

Fast isn’t always better. Better is better.

Data for trash

I’m hoping we are 10 years away from when you dump your trash into various trash cans for different purposes (recycling, compost, etc.) and wait to get your trash rating.

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The trash rating would come from scanners in these cans which can detect if you did the right thing. For example, they’d be able to tell if the compost level went down from 100% to 98% and, with data on the change of weight, the approximate amount of non-compost material you dumped. You would have scanned in your home’s card or ID number to get to the trash room. So, bad garbage dumping would have an effect on your overall trash adherence rating.

The trash adherence rating wouldn’t be all that different from a credit rating. In this world, it would have 2 important consequences –
1. Your adherence rating would be known when you file for a job and when you apply to buy/rent a house. Employers and house owners would want to keep their average adherence ratings down.
Why? Glad you asked..
2. A poor adherence rating would mean higher taxes. The rationale is straightforward – the poorer your adherence rating, the more work for garbage collectors and sorters and the worse the externalities for society. To make sure the tax incidence is progressive, we could target a part of the funds into lower income households while ensuring incidence is much higher on higher income folks.

Given what we know about our human penchant for not acting till we absolutely have to, maybe the linkage of our trash data and taxes are a bit far fetched. Hopefully, the rest isn’t though. I’d love to see home data for trash and energy use, for example. Just seeing the data and being able to compare our usage with local/global averages could go a long way in reducing pollution and energy waste.

The teacher or the course

Does it matter that your favorite teacher is teaching a course you are only partly interested in? Does it matter that the course you’re looking to study doesn’t have a great teacher?

I think both the teacher and the course matter – but, when in doubt, I’ve learnt to pick the teacher. If there is a skill or subject you absolutely need to learn, unless the teacher is downright horrible, it makes sense that you do it. However, there are very few courses that fall under the absolutely essential category.

Great teachers, on the other hand, transform your point of view on a subject. In teaching a particular subject, great teachers effectively teach the same thing – “how to see.” They teach us how to look at a problem, break it down into something simpler, make sense of the data and apply judgment as we make a decision. They stay great because they approach their subject (and, often, life) as students. In doing so, they teach us how to approach life as eager and curious students.

Most of all, they are great because they obsess about our learning and care more than anyone might think possible. So, when in doubt, I’ve learnt that it makes sense to just gravitate toward incredibly obsessive and caring people whether or not you care about what they’re teaching. Care and growth are guaranteed.

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