The Apple Pay moment

I took a quick look at tickets for Kung Fu Panda 3 a few days ago on my laptop. As soon as I found them, I did something that I’d never done – I pulled out my phone, opened the Fandango app, found the movie and paid via Apple Pay (i.e. by just placing my thumb on the home button).

I generally make sure I do my online shopping on my laptop. I find it much easier to type in card details on my keyboard vs. on the phone. And, in most cases, there are plenty of auto fill options that make the process faster.

But, every time I’ve used Apple Pay on my phone, I have loved it. It just makes me feel good as I think of all the typing I’ve just avoided. And, even if my last experience buying tickets was a good 6 weeks back, I still remember the feeling.

This was definitely one of those moments when I noticed my behavior as a user, paused for a moment to observe myself and then said – “Wow!”

Apple Pay hasn’t taken off yet. But, I’m long on its prospects. It removes friction – and that’s what great products do.

Apple PaySource

Career and life lessons from a business class upgrade

I was upgraded to business class on Emirates Airlines last month for a 4 hour leg of a 17 hour journey. It was funny how I immediately found myself wishing I had been upgraded for the longer leg. Ha. Human nature. It had been a while since I traveled business on a good airline and what I observed had some interesting implications on thinking about careers and life.

To begin with, I perceived a change in behavior from the staff the moment I got my upgrade at the counter. I felt I was suddenly treated with more respect and felt special. Of course, the comforts were great – a full recline bed on which you can sleep comfortably and a table on which you can get work done without feeling squished. But, what struck me was the visible difference in the way I was treated. This disappeared the moment I stepped back into Economy for the longer leg.

The principle here is signaling. I was treated as someone with perceived higher value simply because of my accidental/serendipitous business class tag. It is powerful because we, as humans, are always categorizing people and things. And, signaling, one way or the other, determines which buckets we fall into.

So, when it comes to planning careers, my thought process and advice are really boring – work hard, get into the best school you can get into, then work hard and get good grades (or do something really cool in the risk-free zone that is school), then get into the best job you can get into, do very well and you’ll find yourself with more options over time. The reason for this boring advice is that it reduces downside. Yes, we love talking about entrepreneurs who made billions by taking crazy risks. That is largely media fueled nonsense. Most smart entrepreneurs are actually masterful de-riskers – they only take the next risk when they feel they’ve minimized chances of failures. And, as far as drop outs who made billions go, the most storied of the lot – Bill Gates, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and Mark Zuckerberg – dropped out of Harvard and Stanford. I daresay they would have done fine even if things hadn’t worked out at Microsoft, Google and Facebook.

Fivethirtyeight had a sobering article titled “Rich Kids Stay Rich, Poor Kids Stay Poor” presenting results from a research study on how growing up in poverty affects kids. One of the charts in the article was –

career, wealth

Most charts told a similar story – folks who grew up in wealthy families remained wealthy as adults.The article underlines just how hard social mobility is. And, if these were the results in the US (the land of opportunity), I can only imagine what similar studies would unearth elsewhere.

My hypothesis is that the principle that underlies all of this is, again, signaling. Do well early and you reduce downside for the rest of your careers. Once you’ve reduced that downside, you are well placed to take risks to increase upside. That isn’t to say your chances are low otherwise. But, it is also no coincidence that you have an absurd number of risk takers in places like the Silicon Valley. The truth is that places like the Silicon Valley both place a premium on failure and encourage risk taking once you’ve had a stint at a successful tech firm. So, in some ways, you’re probably only increasing your career capital. Sure, you will always be able to point to many who “made it” without following this principle. But, I could say with a good degree of confidence that the many are a small proportion of the “many others” who fell by the wayside without a Fortune cover story.

The article and data also goes to show how fortunate you are if you won the genetic lottery and were born into the right family. If you are in those top percentiles, maybe this data ought to be a wake up call to stop complaining about all the things that go wrong and to use all that privilege you have to leave the world better than you found it.

Shifu-isms – doing only what you can do

Long time readers know I am a big fan of the Kung Fu Panda series. While KF3 isn’t as good as the previous two, I enjoyed it all the same.

Master Shifu had a lovely nugget when he was making the case for why Po (the Panda) should now focus on teaching –

If you only do what you can do, you’ll never be better than what you are.

When you become good at something, it is natural to move into a comfort zone of sorts. I’ve found myself reflecting on this by looking for areas where I could push myself more – and there are two that came straight to mind.

A great reminder.

Shifu, comfort zone

Being reductionist

A wise friend remarked that, if we were to be reductionist for a moment, perhaps life just comes down to one central idea – love.

Author and psychologist Scott Peck defined love as the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth. (He treats mental and spiritual growth the same)

There’s a lot to unpack in that definition – “the will,” “to extend,” “nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth” – can all inspire essays themselves. But, to me, it says two things. First, love is a verb. Second, to seek growth is to seek love. True self love, as I have learned over years of daily notes here, requires us to push, challenge and extend ourselves without judgment. Where growth and love are concerned, to speak of one is to speak of another.

As simple as this idea may sound, it is, of course, incredibly hard to consistently act on. But, do small things with extraordinary love and do so one day at a time, and, it is likely we will chart a path that describes a life well lived.

reductionist, love

Attention residue and shallow work – The 200 words project

As last week’s 200 word idea on “Addicted to Distraction” touched on a very specific problem of our age, I thought it might be useful to continue digging deeper into the problem and potential solutions in a “deep work” series inspired by Cal Newport’s latest book on the topic.

In a popular paper on multitasking, researcher Sophie Leroy studied the effect of multi-tasking on performance by forcing task switches in the laboratory (e.g. asking people who were solving word puzzles to switch to review resumes). The results from this and her similar experiments led her to coin the term “attention residue.” When you switch your attention from Task A to another Task B, your attention doesn’t immediately follow – a residue of your attention remains stuck thinking about the original task.
And, people experiencing attention residue were likely to demonstrate poor performance on that next task. The more intense the residue, the worse the performance.

In our work lives, there are 2 sources of attention residue – back-to-back meetings on different topics and smartphone distractions. The more the attention residue, the more we find ourselves in a state of “shallow work” – time when we don’t push our cognitive limits.

How do we fix this if multiple projects is a reality? A simple idea to get us started is to plan weeks in a way where we spend large chunks of time (e.g. an afternoon) on specific projects.

More such ideas and ways to think about the problem and its solutions in later editions..

“High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus)” | Cal Newport


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Source and thanks to: Sophie Leroy – Why is it so hard to do my work?, Deep Work by Cal Newport

Educators

Education changes the way you approach problems. Any experience that has a formative and positive effect on the way you think, act, or behave, is, in essence, educational.

So, it follows that an educator is someone who has had a formative effect on the way you think, act or behave. We don’t stop having educators once we leave school. Instead, our formal educators are replaced by informal educators – colleagues, friends and family we learn from.

Let’s take a moment and think about educators in our lives in the past months – people who’ve changed the way we think, act or behave. And, let’s consider if we’ve done our bit to share lessons we’ve learnt and been educators ourselves, too.

PS: The truest sign of an educator – they are students first, sharers and teachers second.

Anticipation – The Gretzky way

The FiveThirtyEight website had a nice birthday tribute to Wayne Gretzky’s incredible stats.

anticipation, wayne gretzky,

I didn’t know much about Gretzky aside from his oft-quoted quotes. And, I found it very interesting that Gretzky’s size and strength were described as unimpressive by NHL standards. In fact, he was described as “too small, too slow and too wiry” when he started out. He was, however, blessed with athleticism and had worked hard to build up great reservoirs of stamina. But, even that, by NHL standards, didn’t make Gretzky exceptional. These skills were a dime-a-dozen.

Gretzky’s specialty was anticipation. As his Wikipedia page reads –

Despite his unimpressive stature, strength and speed, Gretzky’s intelligence and reading of the game were unrivaled. He was adept at dodging checks from opposing players, and he could consistently anticipate where the puck was going to be and execute the right move at the right time.

Accounts of Gretzky seem to focus on this ability to anticipate what was going to happen. Gretzky’s take is telling (Wally is his father)-

Some say I have a ‘sixth sense’ … Baloney. I’ve just learned to guess what’s going to happen next. It’s anticipation. It’s not God-given, it’s Wally-given. He used to stand on the blue line and say to me, ‘Watch, this is how everybody else does it.’ Then he’d shoot a puck along the boards and into the corner and then go chasing after it. Then he’d come back and say, ‘Now, this is how the smart player does it.’ He’d shoot it into the corner again, only this time he cut across to the other side and picked it up over there. Who says anticipation can’t be taught?

Wally’s drills focused entirely on building anticipation. As described in his autobiography –

Him: “Where’s the last place a guy looks before he passes it?”
Me: “The guy he’s passing to.”
Him: “Which means…”
Me: “Get over there and intercept it.”
Him: “Where do you skate?”
Me: “To where the puck is going, not where it’s been.”
Him: “If you get cut off, what are you gonna do?”
Me: “Peel.”
Him: “Which way?”
Me: “Away from the guy, not towards him.”

Not only were Wally’s drills ahead of their time, Gretzky also benefited from a head-start. In his own words –

See, kids usually don’t start playing hockey until they’re six or seven. Ice isn’t grass. It’s a whole new surface and everybody starts from ground zero. … By the time I was ten, I had eight years on skates instead of four, and a few seasons’ worth of ice time against ten-year-olds. So I had a long head start on everyone else.

Fascinating. Anticipation transformed a played with below average NHL attributes to someone widely considered to be the greatest hockey player of all time. And, best of all, this ability to see ahead was trained – from the age of 2. Seeing ahead is a skill.

The recruiting journey through self doubt – MBA Learnings

The MBA learnings series has two objectives. The first is to develop the discipline to synthesize and share some powerful concepts I’ve learnt while at school. With about four and a half months left at school, I’m hopeful that I’ll continue to do this after I graduate as well. The second has been de-mystify what the journey is really about. I have been surprised at the lack of really good resources on this topic and I hope to have a definitive list of 8-10 posts on the topic that will be helpful to prospective, admitted and current students after I graduate. I’ve listed the 5 posts written so far, below.

Today’s topic is one that aims to de-mystify an important part of the MBA experience – finding a job or, to use a one-word description, “recruiting.” My experiences – both as someone going through the journey myself as well as someone attempting to help others through the experience – have shown that recruiting is hard. It is probably the single hardest piece of the graduate school puzzle.

It is easy to laugh – this is almost as privileged a place to be when it comes to finding a job. Some of the best employers around the world make it a point to invest hours and days on campuses to talk to students about what life at their firm is like. All definitely true. But, I don’t think life gets any easier when you are Bill Gates. Sure, you take away worries around shelter, sustenance, and the like. But, the kind of challenges you face are in no way inferior to everyone else. In fact, it is my belief that challenges of the mind tend to be the hardest to talk about and deal with. As evidence, I have learnt that students from the law school and business schools at most universities are the biggest users of on-campus counseling services.

I think this part of the experience is particularly hard for three reasons. First, every person going through the process has a track record of success that got them into school. It feels natural to expect this to work well with relative ease (and, in a few cases, it does, too). Second, the fact that you’re going through it with so many classmates – some of whom do better than you by balance of probability – increases the pressure. And, finally, most of these folk have received really bad career advice in the past that has led them to believe that there is that one “dream company” out there for them.

In my case, I think the peer pressure involved with the experience definitely made me question my own competence and abilities more than once in those moments. I made a couple of unusual choices and those came back as questions – did you do the right thing? What if you had done things differently?, etc. It also took what seemed like ages for any progress to come through. It was tough and it definitely felt like a journey through self doubt. It all worked out though – as I believe it did for most folk who put in the work. That doesn’t mean it is easy. And, it definitely doesn’t mean it isn’t worth it.

Among the things that helped me in that period, I would pick 3 that were particularly helpful –

1. Focus on the feeling of walking away knowing you did your best. At every point, I just focused on getting to one thing – the feeling of walking away from the interview knowing I gave it my best shot. Since all my energy was focused on that one goal, it made my life a lot easier since I didn’t attach myself to any one outcome. This also took away any possible focus on a “dream job.” Sure, I felt extra pressure on a couple but, as I’d intentionally stayed away from focusing on the outcome, it felt easier. The principle here is to to focus on the process and trust that good processes lead to good outcomes in the long run.

2. Read Harry Potter. I’ve shared this story with many first years. I directed a lot of the pressure into reading Harry Potter. Now, of course, I don’t advocate you do that. But, I do think it is helpful to find something that completely distracts you – so, find your own Harry Potter. I remember my wife offering up my iPad anytime she felt I was feeling the pressure. Thanks JKR! In general, when I wasn’t in class, I made it a point to be home by myself. I preferred solitude to hearing the constant chatter about “the latest and greatest.” I was on a light course load during that quarter and had plenty of time to myself. I spent this time researching about companies, reading Harry Potter and sleeping – my antidote to the pressure.

3. A 2nd year support group. I had a small group of 2nd year friends who I stayed in close touch with during the process. I engaged a couple of them on helping me with most aspects of the interview and another couple who helped me exclusively with cases. I kept this group informed of everything that was going on and vented, on occasion, to them. While I knew I could count on them to never mince words if I was doing something wrong, they were also generous with their time, energy and support. All of this helped give me plenty of perspective and was incredibly helpful.

So, if you are a 1st year going through the process, keep plugging away. The one thing that is worth remembering is that this is one of many job switches in the coming years. Focus on the long term outcome and use the process to learn how to approach finding a job better. This is definitely hard.. but it also definitely helps to keep perspective. There are a a few billion people who’d love to be in your place.

And, if you’re a 2nd year, I hope you’ll remember to balance being direct with your feedback and generous with your hugs.

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1. I’m in, Now what? – An attempt at helping you structure your transition to school once you are admitted.
2. Advice to an incoming student – A long “expectation setting” post that breaks life at school into a tension between 6 priorities
3. Designing for introversion – An introvert’s guide to thinking about the MBA experience
4. Lessons learnt from internship recruiting – Lessons + a guide to how to think about the summer before school
5. Digging into my 1st year process – A reflection on how I approached my 1st year and what I learnt

self doubt, recruiting, mba learningSource

To have a shot at change

To have a shot at retaining employees, you have to first accept they will leave.

To have a shot at making the sale, you have to accept that the customer may have no real need for your product.

To have a shot at exercising regularly, you have to first accept that it won’t happen unless you intentionally find place and energy for it in your schedule.

To have a shot at maintaining deep relationships, you have to be willing to let those you love go.

To have a shot at success in your project, you have to be willing to accept that it might not work.

To have a shot at becoming a better person, you have to first accept that your natural instincts will likely not lead there.

It feels easier to hold onto ideas that pre-suppose success and change – as if they were so easy. The keyword in that sentence is to “hold on.” Holding on always feels easier. Letting go is hard. But, to be able to lead change, we need to be able to accept change ourselves.

Again, the counter intuitive shows us the way – the first step in being able to change is accepting things as they really are and not as we want them to be.

change, accept reality

What are you taking a break from?

Is it a break from distractions to do work? Or a break from work to get distracted?

The former is what happens when we just go with the flow. The latter, on the other hand, requires us to be intentional.

A powerful saying by author Malcolm Muggeridge came to mind as I was thinking about this – “Never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream.”

Maybe living without intention is more existing than living.

distractions, intentions, living, existing

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HT: Cal’s book on Deep Work. More will follow in the coming weeks on lessons from the book.